The Great Filter
A new podcast exploring nascent startup ideas
In 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake came up with an equation to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy capable of radio-communication.
The Drake Equation identified several variables—such as R*, the average rate of star formation in our galaxy, and fp, the fraction of formed stars that have planets—which if known or estimated would help scientists reason about the probable existence of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy.
Drake and his colleagues plugged in their own estimates for each variable and determined that—in the Milky Way alone—there ought to be between one thousand and one hundred million civilizations.
If that range were anywhere close to accurate you might expect Earth to have detected some signatures of E.T. by now. Our failure to do so is known as the Fermi Paradox and for decades scientists and armchair philosophers have sought an explanation for this apparent contradiction.
One popular idea is that there are various “great filters” that serve as massive road blocks on the path to becoming a galaxy-colonizing civilization. Perhaps it’s easy for matter to form unicellular life, but the jump to multicellular life is surprisingly difficult. Or perhaps all intelligent life eventually invents a technology that precipitates its own extinction.
On Earth, we may have been extraordinary lucky to get past one or more great filters and many others could still lie ahead of us.
But this is not a post about the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, or universe simulations. This is a post about startups.
The rate of startup formation today is staggering. Promising startups launch with such regularity that we even have a startup devoted to keeping track of them all: Product Hunt.
Arguably, what ends up on Product Hunt is just the upper crust. There are startups which never make it to launch or never make it on the Product Hunt homepage. It’s not unreasonable to think there are hundreds of startup teams forming each day with a dream of someday striking it big.
There’s a rule of thumb that 90% of startups fail, and frankly the real number is probably higher. With the cost of starting a new startup approaching zero, we’ve seen an explosion of startups and new tech products, but have we seen a commensurate explosion of successful companies?
Perhaps you think that actually valuations are inflated and actually there should be fewer unicorns and actually it’s a bubble. Perhaps. But a question no-one seems to be asking is: How many unicorns should there be conditional on a given rate of startup formation?
Recently someone made a website called Product Haunt. The joke is that “Product Haunt” is the graveyard of Product Hunt—cataloging all of the startups that have shut down since launching on Product Hunt.
When I showed a friend Product Haunt he said: “We already have a catalog of dead startups. It’s called Product Hunt.”
You can get whiplash from how quickly startups shut down or disappear from view after launching (with fanfare!) on Product Hunt. BGR called the death of Peach just four days after it launched.
What’s fascinating is not that we have so many failed startups. It’s that so many failed startups seem to have had a kernel of an interesting idea when they launched. The (short-lived) excitement around Peach suggests the founders had identified something interesting that we shouldn’t just ignore out of hand.
Maybe they were on to something. Or maybe not. But either way, what went wrong exactly?
The Great Filter is a new podcast where we try to identify fertile opportunities for startup founders.
On each episode of The Great Filter, we will take a critical look at one promising very early-stage startup or emerging technology and analyze its potential for future success. Why do we find the idea interesting? What issues will the founders face going forward?
Apple and Facebook are fascinating, but we won’t be discussing the latest tech news of the day. We’ll be looking further afield to the abstract ideas and little known companies that could shape the future in surprising ways.
Also, The Great Filter will never be about calling out startups that we think will fail—that would be way too easy. Instead we expect to focus specifically on areas where we think new startups could succeed.
With so many great filters ahead for early-stage startups, skepticism has to be the default lens, but that doesn’t preclude optimism either. After all, humanity is still alive and kicking.
