(2014-03-15) Dixon Full Stack Startups

Chris Dixon pitches the concept of "FullStackStartup-s". The old approach was to sell or license your technology to the existing companies in that industry. The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies. Prominent examples of this “full stack” approach include Tesla, Warby Parker, Uber, Harry’s, Nest, BuzzFeed, and NetFlix. Most of these companies had “partial stack” antecedents that either failed or ended up being relatively small businesses. (Start Up, Disruptive Innovation)

Mar23: Balaji Srinivasan agrees.

Martin Spindler challenges the idea. For the last year, whenever I gave a talk about the Internet Of Things, I have been talking about the importance of accepting and respecting what Stewart Brand called "Shearing Layer-s". Coming at it from a critique of corporate visions revolving around "Smart Cities" and the "Intelligent Planet" or the "Sensing Environment", the thing that stands out is a blatant disregard for this elemental concept of architecture... Sometimes parts of the stack are just Infrastructure you can rely on.

Coincidence that this approach requires big OPM?