Death of the Middle
We hosted an event tonight to bring together consumer entrepreneurs across Paris.
It was awesome to have so much entrepreneurial energy in the room. It's why I do the job, and I could feel my battery getting recharged just from being around people who are so irrationally optimistic about the future and so dedicated to build it.
My favourite conversation was with a founder who was in the middle of pivoting. He had just raised a $4m seed round from a top-tier (and I mean top tier) international investor for his business, and despite things continuing to go well with the business, he had decided to completely rethink it.
The logic he laid out for the decision is that everything in software is becoming so much easier to build that he no longer had conviction that the original idea offered a path to building a generational company.
He likened the current dynamics in software to what the music industry had gone through post-Internet. Back in the day, record labels were required participants in the ecosystem to help musicians fund the original recording and cut through in a concentrated and centralised media landscape. Now, the cost of production has dropped to zero and the decentralisation of distribution (via Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) means there is a fundamentally less need for the record label role. The world bifurcates into the majors at one end - who still play a role for the Taylor Swifts of the world operating at scale - and the indies at the other, doing it for the craft. The middle dies.
The conversation felt at once optimistic (to paraphrase: "there will be millions of solo entrepreneurs") and apocalyptic (to paraphrase: "most startups will be wiped out"). But it was hard to argue with its central premise, and harder still to not take the same logic and apply it to the VC industry.
It's all of our jobs now to figure out if we are in the middle, and if we are, what to do about it. Quickly.