This article assumes all knowledge is equally valuable, equally hard to gain, and decays at the same rate, but none of that is true.

Frameworks change constantly, computer languages less frequently, and architectural notions much less frequently. Yet the value and difficulty of learning is exactly reversed.

The nature of the media that defines the marketing strategy changes relatively slowly compared to tech. Successful business strategies change still slower than the marketing, and the actual behavior of people much more slowly.

Most of the facts that are changing the fastest are very cheap to "re-discover". So cheap that there is a term for it: the Google Effect.

I can't see any particularly good lessons for startups from the article as a result.

Lets narrow it to tech startups. When I started my company in 1999 if you weren't in a startup hub it was very hard to come by certain knowledge. Usually you learned the hard way which shortened your runway of both cash and time.

Now there's a lot more information on the web. It requires some study for the first timer to decide which is the correct information and what is just noise. But the resources are there and I would bet this information is changing much slower than from the nineties to present day.

HN and around a dozen blogs are the biggest resources that I've got.

Although a really interesting post, I beg to differ at one point at least.

The materialistic aspects of startup knowledge definitely have a half-life, sure enough.. but when you are talking about things like "fail-fast", I don't think they're "fashionable."

Startup wisdom - which stems from knowledge - cannot go stale in most cases. Intricate details like what kind of a metric you use to see what affects the conversions can change but the very fact that you should track your conversions doesn't change for centuries or more.

If this is what you did mean by startup knowledge, thanks for writing this! :)

> Founders should try to see around corners to anticipate what knowledge today will be obsolete tomorrow, and find their place accordingly.

I'm not sure how I feel about the final point in the article. It's really hard to predict a change in knowledge. All you have to do is read the "Key Trends of 2012" articles that were written at the end of 2011 to see how hit and miss we are about predictions. Those that correctly "predicted" a shift look like geniuses. Those that didn't...

This kind of thinking is one of the reasons I spent my teens and 20s emphasizing things like mathematics and human languages instead of something more applied.

I was following along until he said "There is a dinosaur called the Brontosaurus" was no longer "true." Apparently I missed that update:

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-the-b...

We've been building businesses in our society for years and years, how could 'startups' be considered an immature industry?

What in the world is the 'startup industry'? I thought you could start a business in any industry at any point.