How the Tech Industry Forgot What it Means to Disrupt

According to Google trends (and corroborated by my own vaguely accurate memory), the word “disrupt” first started getting tossed around with its current meaning circa 2010. At that point in time, tech companies were exploding onto the scene with technology that was powerful enough to cause paradigm shifts within entire industries, and the phenomenon was thusly given a name: disruption.

The title stuck. Not only did it make tech 10x cooler by giving dorks like me an excuse to unleash the rebellious, “fight the power” part of ourselves that didn’t get much exercise in high school, it also became something of a rallying call and general motif for the entire industry; What do we do? We disrupt. We are disruptors. Founders, angels, incubators, accelerators, and VCs alike, we disrupt.

From that point forward, everything became about disruption — and for good reason. It was a single word that captured the ethos of what was working so well in the tech industry: refusing to settle for the status quo, taking risks on unconventional ideas, being able see friction as a massive opportunity.

Venture capitalists started simplifying their investment theses to, “We invest in startups that are disrupting industries.” Founders made it their go-to response to any question about what their startup does: “We’re disrupting _______.” TechCrunch50 became TechCrunch Disrupt, and in a hilariously Thesaurus-based decision, Amazon’s conference became Amazon Re:Invent.

It was a great moment for tech. We’d wrapped ourselves in a common identity — the disruptor — that commanded admiration and respect, and which brought new life to the industry. It made tech cool, attracted new talent, and solidified its reputation as something worth talking about.

And then we made the same mistake that so many people who stumble into success make: we let it go to our heads.

At first it was just little things — tech’s high opinion of itself gave rise to the pretentious mobility devices and ridiculous job perks which serve little purpose other than to satisfy the sense of self righteousness being cultivated by rapidly inflating egos. But those soon turned into massive overindulgences, absurd to the point that Mike Judge felt the need to twist them into a satirical comedy. These overindulgences were, and continue to be, the physical manifestation of the industry’s belief in its own intrinsic superiority, and it’s exactly that belief that’s sucking the spirit of disruption right out of tech.

What’s different about it, though? Well, the onboarding is pretty slick.

These days, people working in tech speak as though they belong to an elite class, comprised of those who are blessed with the infinitely desirable, totally unacquirable ability to “think differently,” and that it is such effortless ability, not hard work, which justifies their success and the success of tech itself. Vanity has made tech lazy.

People now get excited over apps like Peach. Peach! Their TechCrunch writeup actually contains the sentence, “What’s different about it, though? Well, the on-boarding is pretty slick.”

And yet we’re accepting this as innovation, despite the fact that the entire premise of the company is nothing more than a novel method of gif-sharing. Excuse my cynicism, but that’s a sorry excuse for disruption.

Disruption, in my humble opinion, has been replaced by formulaic approximations of things that used to be disruptive. Instead of seeking out new industries to disrupt, founders now look to simply reconfigure existing products that have already succeeded and hope that the novelty of change is enough to acquire users. But it’s not just founders that are on autopilot; Everyone in tech is doing it. Pretty much every incubator/accelerator in existence has a self-satisfied statement on its homepage touting how they’re “redefining startup financing,” when in reality they’re all just copying Y-Combinator, a company whose model was actually disruptive.

And then there’s the funders.

A few days ago, while doing some research for CityGrows, the GovTech startup I founded, I stumbled into an article on VentureBeat entitled Why GovTech is Broken. The author tells the story of how his GovTech startup, TallyVoting, failed due to government’s inability to work efficiently enough with a bootstrapped startup for the startup to meet the expectations of their backing VC. He then goes on to point out the ways in which both the government and the tech industry need to make changes in order to accommodate innovation in this space.

While I agree that improvements on either end would make things easier, I find the implication that it might in any way be the government’s responsibility to do so infuriating. Why? Because the government doesn’t mill about talking about how good it is at disrupting things! Tech, on the other hand, does, and it is therefor absolutely the tech industry’s responsibility to figure out how to work with government, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, the rhythm of the tech industry is set by a group of people who, at the time of this writing, seem to have no intention of doing so.

How many users do you have? Are you growing 30% month over month?

Many funders will base their decision to invest on little more than a founder’s response to those two questions, despite their heavy bias toward consumer apps in the media space. Sure, if your company’s purpose is to give friends a way to share photos with each other, those are relevant questions to ask, but what if you’re Harlan Hill, the CEO of TallyVoting, and your business sells SaaS voting software to governments? What if your sales cycle is based entirely around the election cycle, and your users are voters? How can you possibly expect that kind of month over month growth? Something’s got to give.

The questions above do not foster disruption in tech. The market they’re tailored for has already been disrupted, and all they do now is create an incentive to build repeat products that do little to improve our lives. You wanna know why Peach’s on-boarding is its biggest selling point? Because it makes it easier for the company to achieve 30% growth. That’s it.

Disruption doesn’t follow a pattern. That’s why it’s called disruption. If an investor says no to a company with a great idea and a great team, simply because their business is navigating uncharted territory and doesn’t fit neatly into some sort of archetype, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with running a predictable business. But if that’s the decision they choose to make, they have no right to call themselves a disruptor. That’s not disruption; That’s just business as usual.

The tech industry’s reputation wasn’t built on lukewarm milk. We enjoy the reputation we do because we are disruptors, and we do do things differently. But as we move into new industries and beyond the world of consumer tech that fueled us for the better part of the last decade, we’re going to need to remember how exactly we got here, and that we’re more than just a bunch of dorks that know how to remove drop panels from office ceilings. We need to remember how to disrupt.