That was a great post. It's a very valid point that there are things going on in the world which are just as important as - if not for more important than - M&A around Internet media hubs. Seeing even one media site take a refreshingly honest stance like this warms the heart.
This many years after the 'net bubble burst, you'd think we would have gotten beyond this obsession with net media sites. But sadly, no... this reminds me of a year or two ago, when there was a similar situation involving, aaaah, I don't remember, maybe Facebook or something, and around the same time there was a huge enterprise software deal (IBM bought somebody, or something). Net result: The Facebook (or whoever it was) deal was reported everywhere, all over HN, Reddit, etc. The other deal? Crickets...
Whether all of us want to admit it or not, we do participate in something of an echo chamber here, and anything that comes along now and then and helps tear down those walls, even to a small degree, is a Good Thing.
IOW, there's a much bigger world out there than the world of YC, Twilio, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, AirBnB, Medium, Apple, 37 Signals, Heroku, Square, Twitter, Facebook, Color, etc.
The simple fact of the matter is that the (consumer-facing) tech industry is much more sexy than pharma, by virtue of people consciously interacting with tech products on a daily basis. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry these days wants to make a mobile or web app, and it's getting easier for them to do so with each passing year.
In comparison, biotech doesn't have this phenomenon, which makes it a good industry to get into if you know what you're doing.
"Sexy", maybe. Depending on how you define that, and on your perspective. But more important in the general sense? I think you'd have a harder time supporting that argument if you tried to make it.
And anyway, I don't think anybody is arguing for a "black and white" world where one or the other of these deals gets all of the media attention and the other goes completely ignored... it seems that the call is to acknowledge both and treat them both as potentially very important.
> But more important in the general sense? I think you'd have a harder time supporting that argument if you tried to make it.
I'm not suggesting it's more important - quite the opposite. Pharma is very important. It's just not as accessible or comprehensible to the general public. So if you're looking to start a company, on average, you'll find that the competition is scarcer in pharma than in tech. How often does a 17 year old singlehandledly found and sell a company for $30 million to big pharma?
The problem is the overwhelming majority of 17 year olds don't know enough to make useful pharma research. And other than research not much really scales well-enough to be worth 30 million.
Think of it this way computer research goes back around 100 years, medical research goes back well over 2,000 years. There is simply less low hanging fruit left.
PS: Consider this there is a large but finite number of reasonably stable chemicals with 10 atoms or less. All of them have been considered as to there medical impacts. (There toxicity if nothing else.)
> The problem is the overwhelming majority of 17 year olds don't know enough to make useful pharma research.
There's more to it than that. The reason why the overwhelming majority of 17 year olds don't know enough to make useful pharma research is because it's not so easy to learn those skills and gain that knowledge.
Any 17 year old can teach himself to code and get valuable, real-world programming experience (and an actual job, for that matter) with nothing more than a laptop and an internet connection - everything else is free. He can then start a company, all from his parents' home.
You cannot say the same about pharma. The capital investment needed is much higher, the regulations are much stricter, and blind trial-and-error isn't an option unless you want to put your own life at risk. To put it simply, you're quite literally in the (human) meatspace.
Actually, the ability to make drugs or biologicals is quickly dropping in complexity. Right now, one can design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation. There are production agencies that can make one's design real. The only reason this is not as accessible and known as 3D printing is that the design phase requires much more specialized knowledge. It's not unlike designing one's own circuit board and getting one of the shops to print it for you.
That is absolutely false. We cannot reliably design drugs computationally, and that doesn't even take into account the tremendously difficult problem of predicting efficacy and toxicity. Drug interactions are very complex, poorly understood, and while our ability to do predictive analysis has improved a lot, we are not even close to designing drugs computationally today. What we can do is minimize the amount of trial and error and direct fugure experiments.
> Actually, the ability to make drugs or biologicals is quickly dropping in complexity. Right now, one can design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation.
Uh, no you cannot. I have worked on these exact sorts of problems, and we are nowhere near being able to "design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation."
Dr. Alexander Shulgin managed to some pretty groundbreaking drug design in his small home laboratory.
Of course it was hardly rigorous, and his analysis of what he made was mostly subjective rather than scientific, but it seems kind of analogous to what a hacker does vs what an engineer does.
I'm not sure how this is related to the technical issue of not being to just "design" drugs on a computer and have them "printed out."
> in his small home laboratory.
You can certainly work out of a home laboratory, if you so desire. The location is not particularly relevant. But it will definitely cost you a lot more than a laptop and internet would. And even then, what Shulgin did was quite limited by his capital resources.
> it seems kind of analogous to what a hacker does vs what an engineer does.
Don't forget that he already had a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley. If he had just tried to learn like a "hacker," he would have either bankrupted or killed himself (or killed someone else and ended up in jail).
And even then, he got raided by the DEA and fined $25000 (the regulation issue).
I think OP missed one important point. Tumblr acquisition is like a Cinderella story: young high-school drop-out builds a billion dollar company. It is so American Dream! That's something average person would rather hear instead of "one bigco is merging with another bigco". Actavis news are for CNBC, not for general population.
But here at HN we should be better informed about other businesses and technologies than just Cinderella stories. Yahoo Tumblr deal news were on HN front page probably in 5 separate stories.
businesses and technologies than just Cinderella stories.
Wishful thinking. I see far more political stories than enterprise M&A on here. In fact, I very rarely see M&A on here. For example, Workday's IPO should have been on the frontpage. Hint - It wasn't and you've probably never heard of Workday.
I found this CNN post very shallow and naive. The main factor that impacts how widely an acquisition is reported is not what the company does, but rather, the household name recognition of the acquiree.
The reason Tumblr is reported widely in the media is because most people have heard of Tumblr. The reason Actavis/Warner Chilcott was not, is because no one has ever heard of either. If it had been the acquisition of Boeing, Pfizer, or any other company outside of tech that has household name recognition, you would see similar media attention.
This many years after the 'net bubble burst, you'd think we would have gotten beyond this obsession with net media sites. But sadly, no... this reminds me of a year or two ago, when there was a similar situation involving, aaaah, I don't remember, maybe Facebook or something, and around the same time there was a huge enterprise software deal (IBM bought somebody, or something). Net result: The Facebook (or whoever it was) deal was reported everywhere, all over HN, Reddit, etc. The other deal? Crickets...
Whether all of us want to admit it or not, we do participate in something of an echo chamber here, and anything that comes along now and then and helps tear down those walls, even to a small degree, is a Good Thing.
IOW, there's a much bigger world out there than the world of YC, Twilio, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, AirBnB, Medium, Apple, 37 Signals, Heroku, Square, Twitter, Facebook, Color, etc.