I think being in a highly regulated market is orthogonal to the original point. Regulatory compliance is a checkbox and not a differentiating capability, even if it is an arduous checkbox. Hard/Deep tech is a completely different animal. None of the three YC companies you list fall under this rubric as they are essentially novel presentation layers on existing tech (yes, this includes Cruise, whose tech I am familiar with). The point isn’t about startups where the hardest thing you need to do is business execution and compliance.
Some kinds of hardcore tech, even deep software tech that has no compliance issues, has extremely steep engineering hurdles that must be cleared before you have the most minimal of MVPs that will have any currency with customers. How do you iterate fast when the most minimal demonstration of capability requires writing hundreds of thousands of lines of highly sophisticated code from scratch? Or requires physical engineering that necessarily takes years to complete? Many of these kinds of opportunities exist but almost all of the “ship-and-iterate” guidance is for companies that are using core tech, not creating core tech. That’s playing the startup game on easy mode.
If we end up in a place where a “tech startup” is defined as companies that are technically trivially to execute and amenable to rapid ship-and-iterate, which admittedly is most of them, then we might as well elide “tech” from the nomenclature. At that point, they are merely tech-enabled ordinary businesses, and what ordinary business isn’t tech-enabled these days? If deep tech problems could be solved by slapping together some open source and layering on clever marketing, they wouldn’t be problems.
It feels like we’ve redefined “tech startup” to exclude doing hard technical things, but aren’t honest about that change in definition.
Some kinds of hardcore tech, even deep software tech that has no compliance issues, has extremely steep engineering hurdles that must be cleared before you have the most minimal of MVPs that will have any currency with customers. How do you iterate fast when the most minimal demonstration of capability requires writing hundreds of thousands of lines of highly sophisticated code from scratch? Or requires physical engineering that necessarily takes years to complete? Many of these kinds of opportunities exist but almost all of the “ship-and-iterate” guidance is for companies that are using core tech, not creating core tech. That’s playing the startup game on easy mode.
If we end up in a place where a “tech startup” is defined as companies that are technically trivially to execute and amenable to rapid ship-and-iterate, which admittedly is most of them, then we might as well elide “tech” from the nomenclature. At that point, they are merely tech-enabled ordinary businesses, and what ordinary business isn’t tech-enabled these days? If deep tech problems could be solved by slapping together some open source and layering on clever marketing, they wouldn’t be problems.
It feels like we’ve redefined “tech startup” to exclude doing hard technical things, but aren’t honest about that change in definition.