Imagine I told you I had a great idea for a business and wanted you to invest. My idea: we’re going to find really great websites, ones with niche high-quality information about a specific topic. Then what we’re going to do is print all these websites onto dead trees. That’s right, we’re going to go out to the forest, chop down lots of trees, and then print websites on them. We’ll then find hundreds of big trucks, and load them up with hundreds of thousands of these dead trees, and ship them to every single suburb on Earth, where we are going to set up little shops that sell the dead trees. Of course, these websites keep updating, so we’re going to have to ship out a new set again on a monthly, weekly, sometimes daily basis.
If I told you that was my idea, I’m pretty sure you would say I was nuts. But that’s exactly what the world’s newspaper and magazine companies are still doing.
– Matt Barie, “Entrepreneurs, Go Distrupt a Goliath!“
I like the dead trees image. But it is a mistake to think that even a newspaper website is doing the same thing as a newspaper made of dead trees. Newspapers now advertise their own websites, with “read more online” tags. It is in fact crazy how the dead tree world paradigm is being transplanted into the 10 x faster, easier, better, cheaper and disruptive world online.
Governments and corpocracy are rushing to crush the latter’s freedoms, controlling and in many cases strangling access to innovators. Erstwhile disruptors are increasingly defenders – buying out innovation to stamp out competition and mining patents to tie up potential competitors in lawyer-enriching litigation: the dead wood who emprison innovators – when not scaring them to death – in dead trees.
Zuckerberg applies the dead tree world paradigm to Fb in comparing it to a nation-state: it’s clearly not a democratic one.
Belief in disruption has itself fallen victim to the dead tree paradigm: start-ups are now an industry with an industrial code – Lean Start-Up as rule-book, for example – and “pitching” your “disruptive ideas” has become a spectator-sport. ‘Start-ups’ exists as an industry to hide the fact that the chance of any of them being successful is less than one in ten thousand.
So please invest 10 x what you would normally in Little Elephant, social media that’s actually social, as it takes on the Titans with nothing more than the iota of your lingering belief that there may in fact still be imagination: https://gust.com/c/littleelephantltd
