A Series of Tubes

The process of starting startups is currently like the plumbing in an old house. The pipes are narrow and twisty, and there are leaks in every joint. In the future this mess will gradually be replaced by a single, huge pipe. The water will still have to get from A to B, but it will get there faster and without the risk of spraying out through some random leak.

This will change a lot of things for the better. In a big, straight pipe like that, the force of being measured by one's performance will propagate back through the whole system. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress employers, within which the employees waste most of their time in political battles, and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are so few choices. Imagine if that sequence became a big, straight pipe. Then the effects of being measured by performance would propagate all the way back to high school, flushing out all the arbitrary stuff people are measured by now. That is the future of web startups.