---
title: Where Are All the New Great Companies?
published_at: 2016-07-29T15:32:06Z
---

While listening to a few talks and panels on developer tools this week, it
struck me that despite quickly closing in on 2017, when it comes to companies
doing noteworthy things, we're still talking about the same ones as we were in
2012: Heroku, Stripe, GitHub, and to a slightly less reverent extent, the old
giants: Apple, Amazon, and even Bell Labs and PARC.

A lot of other names still get thrown out there, but more often than not,
they're connected to the speaker themselves rather than having made their own
dent in the world. Given that these old notable companies are mostly neutral to
everyone on stage, they seem to occupy an astonishingly disproportionate amount
of our shared consciousness.

So what's going on? Is the developer tooling market so saturated that it's now
impossible to make a splash? Are we all so jaded by broken promises in tech
that we're unwilling to commit to ideas stemming from a new brand? Maybe the
bar to making an impression has just been fundamentally raised. (And then
there's the other possibility of this being explainable by my own biased
misconceptions [1].)

All I can say is that there's been nothing in recent memory that's inspired me
as much as `git push heroku master`, Stripe's API docs, the [12-factor
App][12-factor], or even GitHub's unconventional "no manager" policy [2]. In an
industry that depends on a feedback loop of current players inspiring the next
generation to in turn do their own great things, this is a problem.

[1] I expect that anyone who cared to refute this could list a hundred counter
    examples, but I'd argue that with only maybe a few exceptions, none have
    achieved the widespread dispersion of ideas compared to those of even a few
    years ago.

[2] GitHub has since retracted this idea, and now looks like any other company.

[12-factor]: http://12factor.net/

Add fragment "Where Are All the New Great Companies?"
Add fragment "Where Are All the New Great Companies?"

Small piece of new companies spreading ideas.


Former-commit-id: 5c4c63601f4834f5edd76369a5daaf6ad2257090