I continue to think it’s interesting to draw parallels from natural sciences and what’s happening to the social industry, and also how communities behave and grow. From the five eras of the social web (my inspiration was the stratification of this beach cliff), and watching the enterprise software players (my inspiration was spending a day at a tropical aquarium), there’s yet a third metaphor to explore.
The Cambrian explosion is still hotly debated between creationists and evolutionists, a period of time when millions of species proliferated in a relatively short period of time. This explosion, in theory, gave a tremendous amount of deviation of species that paved a way for the creatures who developed the right features to quickly adapt to the changing environment. Despite the millions of species created, only a few survived and evolved to the modern species we now know.
There’s a lot of similar things happening within the startup space, we saw an explosion of startups appear in this second wave of the web, yet this graphic shows that many are going extinct, and a few were acquired by other organisms. What caused this explosion? At least two factors: Injection of VC money into the developer community, and the low barriers to entry for startups to get going. Opensource development software is virtually free, there are many platforms people are building on top of (Facebook platforms is like an operating system, with instant users), and the need for a large data center can be ‘offshored’ to the cloud.
As the industry matures, we should expect some of the few startups to mature, take the lead and become the dominant species, same as what we saw in the first web wave with weather.com, ebay, craigstlist, google, yahoo, and others. There were thousands of companies that didn’t make it (I saw this first hand as I worked at the massive web host Exodus in Santa Clara). Going with this metaphor, it’ll be interesting to see which companies develop the features of long term monetization –something we haven’t fully seen across the industry –that will foster an increased chance of survival.
Back to you: Aside from generating revenue, what are the key features these young species/companies need to develop?
Having studied some biology in college myself, I think comparing the current renaissance of start-ups to the Cambrian explosion is an exellent analogy.
As you briefly pointed out on your post, the dark side of Cambrian explosion was the extinction of so many of these ‘new’ species, which had new features.
Going back to your quesiton, besides generating revenue, I think one of the key features that start-ups need to focus on is market research and assessment of need and demand for the product or idea they are developing. Instead of inundating the users with yet-another-cool-features, I think they should think about whether it satisfies an exisitng need (which is dynamic).
As you said, eyes were crucial features for a lot of animals that survived to pass on their genes to their offspring. However, there must be so many more features (mainly through mutation) that were introduced to organisms that were not very useful, it not outright counter-productive.
So for start-ups, making sure that their products and features will satisfy some kind of demand is crucial (unlike pets.com, flooz.com, and mvp.com during the late 90’s). I think this goes for almost any project in general… like in SEO it’s stupid to go for keywords that nobody is searching, and for social marketing, it’s pointless for companies to reach out to popular bloggers whose focus is not your industry (but do so just because they are popular).
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