(2024-04-16) Procopio The Future Of Starting A Business Looks Drastically Different In2024

Joe Procopio: The Future of Starting a Business Looks Drastically Different in 2024...the way that startups get funded, built, and grown has shifted dramatically over the past 12 to 18 months. There are a lot of new dynamics that need to be figured out.

early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics, a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.

here’s what I can say definitely changed from 2020 to now.

The Consumer Fell Out of Love With Technology

loss of consumer trust in technology. Today your mobile phone isn’t a vehicle for freedom, but more like an unhealthy combination of big brother and depression machine in your pocket.

And now, the final nail in that coffin — I mean, the final wave in that evolutionary cycle — is a form of artificial intelligence (GenAI) that the tech elite aren’t even bothering to sugarcoat. Don’t get me wrong, AI is still amazing technology, but the hucksters and profiteers came out of the woodwork before the technology even stopped hallucinating.

The Business and Venture Worlds OverIndexed on AI

The issue is what happened in the workforce starting in 2020, when business talent gave corporate America the collective finger. Overnight, seemingly menial jobs for low pay in an unproductive environment located in an expensive and depressing place to live just seemed … stupid.

Suddenly there were Great Resignations, Quiet Quittings, and full-on Workplace Revolutions. But corporate America doesn’t take that kind of thing in stride. Enter AI.

Anyone with a foot in the AI camp already knew the collapse was coming — or at least that the technology being underdelivered could not live up to the promise of the technology being oversold. But corporate America dove in headfirst without a life jacket anyway.

There’s promise, sure, but we’re a long way from practical application and not running people over with self-driving cars.

I can’t tell you how many examples I’ve seen of very promising startups and products getting wrecked because investors went from logical mandates for profitability in 2021 all the way to 2023’s panicked moves to cut spending without regard for consequences.

This kind of thing should be a boon to startups. As incumbents committed unforced spending-cut error after unforced spending-cut error, innovative young companies should have been seizing on the weakness and grabbing market share. But there is no fuel for that fire. These three phenomena together — disinterest in tech, overreliance on AI as a selling point, and slashed-at-all-costs spending — means the money is no longer there for innovation.

What Does the New Normal Look Like?

I’m not saying the old way of funding, building, and growing a startup is dead.

I’m just saying if truly innovative founders want to do truly innovative things, they’re going to be better off:

• Self-founded, self-funded, and self-reliant
• Profitable out of the gate
• Solving problems over selling buzzword tech
• Building with a slow burn rather than chasing explosive growth
• Innovating strategically alongside existing technical innovation