In a famous essay from the 1980s, the great science writer, Stephen Jay Gould, came up with the punchline, the answer to the question that the essay was trying to answer, upfront, in the first paragraph itself. The answer was ‘Damned if I know’. The question that Stephen Jay Gould was addressing was ‘What’s behind the great dinosaur mania that has been sweeping the country during the past few years?’
The nice thing about that answer is that decades later, it is still a perfect answer to many similar questions that people interested in the world of startups ask. ‘What’s behind the great electric mania that has been sweeping USA?’, or ‘What is behind the great cryptocurrency mania that has spread beyond the world of finance and has now irrecoverably leaked into pop culture?’ Damned if I know.
I have been cynical of such fads before. But this will not be one more time that I shall point and snigger at fads, running gleefully with a needle to prick some startup bubbles (and burst them at least within the scope of this column). For what Stephen Jay Gould does in the rest of his essay, gives me a new way to look at fads in the startup world.
After trying to look at various factors that may have caused the dinosaur mania, from accelerated rate of scientific discoveries in the field, to some very Freudian and Jungian ideas about the sizes of dinosaurs, and looking at the “dubious force driving American society”, that is marketing, as a primary suspect, Gould does not come up with any conclusive cause. He instead segues, along with a segue about the etymology of the word ‘segue’, into how the popular mania around dinosaurs may do society good in the longer term.
He talks of how it was fashionable in Korea to be nerdy, and how nine-year-old school kids picked Stephen Hawking as their hero instead of someone from sports or pop culture. And he thought the mania around dinosaurs may become a perfectly good way to make at least certain aspects of nerdery, primarily the need to know everything about a topic and being able to process and store vast amounts of such information, aspirational to kids, and thus aid in creating more scientifically-tempered adults a generation later.
Gould wrote the essay many years before even the first Jurassic Park movie. And only two weeks ago, a good friend of mine with a young child told me how the kid was obsessed with dinosaurs and will soon be an excellent quizzer. In between, I remembered my own childhood fascination with dinosaurs. Gould’s hope for the fad had definitely worked out.
And here is where I might want to re-evaluate some of the fads from the world of startups. Maybe electric scooters will lead us to the Utopia where we do not use petroleum-guzzling cars. Maybe cryptocurrency will one day make centralised banks irrelevant.
Maybe. But then, damned if I know.
The author heads product at a mid-sized startup in the real estate space
