"Disruption" Is How Silicon Valley Eats Its Young

The hate-read news cycle last week was dominated by a story about a tech startup called Bodega, and what a reporter called the company’s quest to “make corner stores obsolete.” Online outrage and much commentary ensued; within a day, the Bodega founders had published a thoughtful apology, clarifying their intent. (Turns out they love bodegas, too, and don’t want to wipe them out.)

Karen Wickre is Backchannel's advice columnist, as well as a veteran word wrangler who's previously worked at Twitter and Google, among others. She's also a media obsessive, internet lover, and art & dog enthusiast.

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The real problem with Bodega’s launch is less about the concept—automated kiosks for nonperishable items in offices, apartments, and campuses—and more about the reaction to such positioning. The idea that yet another Silicon Valley business could wipe out a beloved local institution and remove humans from yet another familiar daily transaction simply worked our collective last nerve. Bodega had hardly begun, and already it was destroying an entire category of businesses.

The problem, really, is this thing called “disruption.”

The business world grants a lot of power to words like “disrupt.” It’s not just Bodega. A search for “disrupt” on BusinessWire reveals how much of a magic signifier that word is. Here are companies promising, from the headline onward, that their new product/service/feature will disrupt baby food, healthcare, energy, corporate hierarchy, and much, much more.

But “disrupt” is only one of the magic beans. The last few years have seen a surge in other terms from which startups and investors can’t seem to stay away: “Ground-breaking,” “unprecedented,” “unique,” and the unforgettable “paradigm shift,” to name a few.

The fact is, most businesses are very unlikely to “disrupt” anything any time soon—if ever. It takes years, if not decades, to know whether a new service, product, or piece of technology is really going to upend an industry or a process, despite founders' claims to the contrary. Yet promises of earth-shattering changes make an appearance from the get-go, in the pitch deck or launching blog post. Magic words seem to apply to all kinds of companies and products, be they multinational or garage-based.

So why venture out onto that clichéd limb? Probably because we in the audience (readers, viewers, consumers, and shareholders) have been privy to a remarkable amount of genuine disruption in the last 10 years. In just this period we’ve witnessed the upending of retail, music, newspapers, mobile phones, advertising, TV, and even more. So now, when a company claims it will disrupt an entire industry, we’re primed to believe them.

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Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine Craig Newmark trumpeting the 1995 launch of Craigslist as “disrupting the classified ad industry.” (Instead, he described the then-nascent email list as “a means of better connecting to people by letting them know about cool or useful events happening around San Francisco.”) What if Sergey and Larry had touted Google, in 1998, as “an unprecedented platform for disrupting global advertising?” (Nope, they focused entirely on potential of web search.) Do you think Jeff Bezos—also in 1995—claimed that Amazon.com was upending global retail? (Hardly. It was considered hyperbole enough to call the e-commerce site “Earth’s biggest bookstore.”) Netflix? Within a few months of its 1997 launch, it did not foresee the actual paradigm shift of media streaming. No, its aim was to “rent and sell DVD movies to owners of DVD video players and DVD-ROM equipped PCs.”

Not a “disrupt” or “unique” in the bunch. These founders who actually have disrupted industries and markets were not grandiose when they started out. They did not overpromise, and wisely did not reveal whatever soaring ambitions they may have had. That’s because no one knows at the beginning what a thing might become—and we cannot trust the promises of fevered language to transport us into a glorious, disrupted future.

Of course, hyperbolic language isn’t unique to tech, and it’s certainly been part of advertising for more than a century. (Early broadsides promised miracle cures for everything from melancholy to hemorrhoids.) And today, we’re living in a new Great Era of Hyperbole, in which hot takes based on provocative headlines and teaser tweets come at us incessantly. As with Charlie Brown’s hapless quest to kick the football, we seem to fall for every dramatic new promise (or threat), and feel compelled to jump into the fray with our opinions. Our roiling political environment, coupled with our ever-deepening reliance on social media, only feeds this compulsion.

I do see why investors get excited by proclaiming that whatever they’re currently backing will “disrupt” the world. (After all, if that’s true, more profit for them!) Their job is to heat up more interest, and, ultimately, please the almighty Markets. I get why, for competitive reasons, they need to think that every new thing is going to be huge. Disruptive.

As Orwell put it, “when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” But as necessary as it is to tell a good story to investors, I hope smart founders and young companies can step away from breathlessness. This is a public service announcement for Silicon Valley founders, funders, and marketers: Skip the oversized predictive claims when you go to market. Tell us instead how your thing is useful to us today. Don’t be bold. Instead, get real.