What's wrong with advertising startups? Some of the most valuable companies on this planet are advertising companies because it's an essential part of success for any business.
Heck, I would wager that >50% of startup employees are not even doing the work they think is most important for the success of the startup. They are doing the work their boss (who by definition is further removed from the facts) thinks is most important.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if >50% of startup employees are doing work they know is not important for the success of the startup.
That's what happens when you run a command and control organization. You lose >50% of your output, in exchange for guaranteed alignment of whatever is leftover. As long as you pay people <50% of what they are worth you can still make money.
While I agree that poor leadership is common, I strongly beg to differ with the reasoning that leadership is removed from the facts.
Friend - 'Engineering' is not 'the facts', or not usually.
Customers, business opportunities, markets, investors - these are usually the 'facts' in a business, and sometimes it means doing things that don't seem obvious to a coder.
I've never seen something great come to fruition that involved a linear progress from 'need' to 'product'. It's usually messy, and involves all sorts of actors.
For example, hacking together a 'throw away' something to impress a customer or to ensure they believe in the capacity of the company would likely been seen as a 'waste' from an ops perspective, but it's certainly not if the business situation calls for it.
Sometimes the facts are in the code, but this is much less often than one would realize.
That said, Palantir is a little scammy. They're just CGI or Accenture by another name.
Not sure why you're referencing engineering? I didn't say anything about that. Not all startup employees are engineers.
> Customers, business opportunities, markets, investors
Customer support is going to have more facts about customers, investors are going to have more facts about investment terms and opportunities, marketing team is going to have more facts about markets, biz dev is going to have more facts about business relationships.
Management is not going to have more facts in any area than anyone really. Their job isn't to understand what's happening in detail, it's to maintain the structure of communication which allows different parts of the company to make good decisions.
If management starts thinking they know more than their employee on a topic, something has gone terribly wrong. They hired someone who doesn't know what they are doing, or they are preventing information from flowing to where it is needed, or they are just being hubristic.
How much freedom you have within a company, the power structure and the actual composition of the work is a completely different discussion.
That's a rather naive statement. should be: s/startups/organizations/g
My time in refugee camps teaching Syrian music to Syrian refugees had more of an impact on the world than any of the companies where I've worked.
When you were a little boy, did you ever say "Mommy, when I grow up I'm going to sell banner ads?"
What are these exactly? Society is a summation of it's people and the success of the ventures they start are a big part of that.
> You argue that advertising is valuable because it's essential, but advertising is only essential because of its own existence.
What's that even mean? Lookup the definition of marketing and you'll see that connecting product information to consumers is needed to actually sell anything, and advertising is the distribution of this message. It's not only valuable, it's critical and necessary for business success.
You might not like being interrupted by ads (especially today's incarnation of ads online) but that is entirely separate from the concept of advertising itself. Saying that advertising isn't valuable is a gross misunderstanding of what advertising actually is.
Ad hominem, properly, is based on an irrelevant characteristic of the person being attacked. "I won't work for a Peter Thiel startup because he wears white shoes after Labour Day", or "... because he mixes stripes and solids".
Stating that he's got a track record of founding and backing ventures with a net-negative social value, or which simply waste talent, is absolutely spot on.
According to his Wikipage, the major things he's done: Paypal, Facebook, Y Combinator, and a couple investment/VC/Angel ventures. None of these are net-negative social value in my opinion, or at least not any more so than virtually any other big business on the planet. He's also backed an impressive number of philanthropic endeavors.
Your comment comes across as someone's angry at Thiel because of the Gawker lawsuit and/or Trump endorsement.
But not ad hom.
I'm not convinced of PayPal and Facebook's net social value. They're quite mixed, though I'll allow transformative.
Both of those involve actual research, which is to say, trying the impossible and unknown, to discover the possible and knowable.
Though I'm also aware that there's a tremendous difference between chasing markets, which gives you drugs such as Viagra, or lifetime (type-II) diabetes management, rather than, say, wiping out tropical disease or promoting diet which would avoid diabetes in the first place.
But what did you have in mind?