We get in these weird conversations where we’re telling them cautionary tales of what happened in 1998, and they look at you like you’re a Grandpa. They were like in 4th Grade when it happened. One thing that’s happening is now enough time has passed that enough kids are coming to the Valley who don’t have a memory of the crash. We’ve only progressed beyond the crash because the old generation, armed with accurate wisdom from their era, passed the baton to a new generation willing to try the same “mistakes” in a world that adapted and evolved. We’d be so far behind where we are today. Imagine if everyone who learned what business models don’t work refused to ever try again, based on the experience of experts who had been there, done that. So imagine if the lessons of the dot-com crash were heeded.
Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago. eToys was a joke, but now look at Amazon. Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. was mocked, but Chewy is now a $30 billion business. So almost every business plan that was mocked for being a ridiculous idea that failed is now, 20 years later, a viable industry. They were just early.” The infrastructure necessary to make most tech businesses work didn’t exist in the 1990s. Marc Andreessen explained how this has worked in tech: “All of the ideas that people had in the 1990s were basically all correct. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical. The important thing is that when something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. The man who carried through our work either did not know or paid no attention to the previous figures … a record of failures – particularly if it is a dignified and well-authenticated record – deters a young man from trying … I cannot discover that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible. They told us we could not cast gray iron by our endless chain method and I believe there is a record of failures. Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.” “We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” He wrote: If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed. That is one of the troubles with extensive records. I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done. There was just one rule, a quirk that seemed crazy but was vital to the company’s success: No one could keep a record of the factory experiments that were tried and failed.
He revolutionized the factory floor by letting his workers experiment, trying anything they could think of to make production more efficient. If you appreciate how much the world evolves you can appreciate how important that advice can be. It tends to create an inability to accept new ideas.” Investor Dean Williams once said, “Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It’s a tricky thing that leads to a long history of older generations whose success came from understanding the new rules of their era not recognizing that the rules may have changed again. They’re often the most important things to pay attention to.īut most things evolve, and evolve faster than people’s beliefs. It’s just hard to accept because people need experts to trust and experts want to hold onto beliefs that were hard-fought to learn. That’s always been the case and will always be. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. Experts From A World That No Longer Exists by Morgan Housel
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