I agree with most of this post. But there's one part he's wrong about. The most precious commodity is not talent. As he said "That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded". That means, when that original photo sharing startup was hiring, it could have filled every position x1000 times, if they could find all those candidates. That's an indication of a vast oversupply of talent.
The most precious commodity is Opportunity: Market opportunity.
And, I know, human desires are endless. But, (legally) solvable problems are not endless, they're currently in very very short supply. this is why we end up with start ups like juicero. out of desperation, entrepreneurs are forced to take on problems that aren't really problems because all the real problems are blocked by legislation/legality/monopoly: education, housing, transportation, medical insurance.
...or maybe there are an infinite number of boring problems out there to solve but that's why they aren't solved, cause they're boring. On the other hand, juicero is exciting.
But seriously, most entrepreneurs are too within their own bubble to know about the problems to solve that are outside their sphere. And there an endless number of them.
Consider this: every day on ProductHunt, we see dozens if not hundred new apps pumped out. How many of those succeed? Not very many. Why?
Each and every one of those apps was designed to solve a problem. So, why is there so little demand? It's because users already have another app/spreadsheet/website/solution/process that does something too similar and because their existing solution is good enough.
The fact that so many apps are being produced and fail to see traction is an indication of massive oversupply of solutions and talent. It's just too easy to produce yet another app, and so everyone does. this inevitably, must lead to an oversupply of solutions.
You're exactly right. Outside of deep deep tech (e.g. self-driving cars), you'd have to really, REALLY dig deep to find one or two startups that failed because of lack of technical talent.
Now consider how many startups failed because of lack of customer demand - nearly all of them.
This isn't just an indicator of an oversupply of talent, it also suggests an oversupply of capital. Cheap money lets you find talent, but it doesn't guarantee a path to a profitable business.
You are wrongly correlating apps launched on ProductHunt to be representative of all problems being solved. If I were to describe one word for ProductHunt launches, then it would be "sensationalist". Most of the apps being launched there are moreso trying to go viral than solving a profound and/or boring problem. The YC launches are probably more representative of the landscape and most of them have never had a ProductHunt launch.
I don't see this at all as related to oversupply of solutions and talent. It's a darwinian structural feature of many of these domains that a very small number of winners will beat out all other solutions, and if the problem is valuable a large number of candidates will compete for the chance to be a winner.
Likewise with talent, roles are not fungible. If I'm engineer #5 at one of 100 photo-sharing startups that's a totally different proposition to being engineer #500 at one large photosharing company. A different sort of candidate is going for that second role and you actually need somewhat different personality and skills. That implies a really different competitive dynamic as well.
I think you need a different kind of talent to build the "hard startups" he's talking about. Sure, there are a million folks who can throw together a CRUD photo-sharing app, especially with the improvements in cloud services and development frameworks in the last decade. If you want to build an AR headset, maybe there's a few dozen people with the right expertise to make it happen.
The most precious commodity is Opportunity: Market opportunity.
And, I know, human desires are endless. But, (legally) solvable problems are not endless, they're currently in very very short supply. this is why we end up with start ups like juicero. out of desperation, entrepreneurs are forced to take on problems that aren't really problems because all the real problems are blocked by legislation/legality/monopoly: education, housing, transportation, medical insurance.