Per Bylund: Silicon Valley Is Bad At Entrepreneurship.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Our goal at Economics For Business is to help entrepreneurs and their businesses succeed. Per Bylund and Hunter Hastings discuss the true implications of the current furor over the anti-market behavior of some of the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley. They are destroying value and consuming capital. Why? How can this happen?

Read Per Bylund’s tweet stream: Mises.org/E4E_101_Twitter

Where Is the consumer?

The Austrian business model emphasizes that the consumer is in first position. The goal of entrepreneurship is the creation of new value, and Austrian entrepreneurs understand that value is an experience, and evaluation is in the consumer’s mind. Entrepreneurs facilitate value experiences, via an understanding of what consumers will value, and of gaps or shortfalls in the value propositions from which they choose today. Business success lies in filling the gaps and solving the shortfalls.

Technology-driven means not thinking about the consumer

The histories of many Silicon Valley tech firms reveal that they started out to build a technology, one that performs efficiently, automates effectively, and exhibits cool features. There’s a pride in engineering, as there should be. But even the most beautiful technology can’t succeed without consumers in mind. The technology-driven approach to innovation must not contravene the principles of the consumer-driven approach to value.

When consumer value is not the business model

Facilitating consumer value is a business model. Value is a learning process for consumers, of which exchange value (paying in dollars for value anticipated) is a component part. The revenue model for the entrep