I try to cling to the myth that this is a slower time of year, a season of buzzing bees and barbecues when we slack off just a little. In deference to this notion, I had just settled in my lawn chair and cracked open the first beer of a lazy Friday afternoon when my peace of mind was shattered by a suspicious presence at the end of the driveway. At first sight, I thought it was a badger on its hind legs, or a large squirrel. But upon further review it revealed itself to be a hipster of some kind in a sleek designer suit and expensive glasses. Once spotted, it pulled itself to the full extent of its negligible height and strode up to me. “Yes?” I inquired.
“Yo,” the hipster replied with a smarmy aura of self-importance. “I suppose I should introduce myself. I’m a disrupter, and I’m here to disrupt whatever it is you think you’re doing, drain it of value, and replace it with something else entirely.”
“Get off my property,” I replied as cordially as I could. “Not only are you trespassing, but you’re obnoxious.”
“Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t look sorry. “I don’t really care about common notions of property or copyright or any of the hoary prevailing assumptions that have dominated your business for generations. By the time I’m done I’m going to be the one sitting in that comfy chair with the nice cold beer. Why don’t you just give it up right now?”
I was nonplussed. My industry has served the public for almost 100 years. We have billions of happy customers. Did this schmendrick have any visible means of replacing this economic model? I asked him that.
“Those are superfluous questions,” he said with some hauteur. “My job is to disrupt. Disrupting is an end in itself. Then, you know, we’ll see.”
That sounded callow. “This disruption of yours,” I asked, “does it have revenue and earnings and profits that are sustainable over time?”
“Our business model presumes virtually no profits at all for the foreseeable future,” he said.
“Well, who would buy into that?” I cried.
“Hello!” Said a booming voice, and out from behind a bush near my porte-cochère came an older gentleman. He put an avuncular arm around his hipster. “I’m his venture capitalist,” he said. “My job is to capitalize the disruption so that it can be sold to some massive Googlish enterprise and all the profits distributed to a few 30-year-old millionaire investors who want to be billionaire investors.”
“And you don’t need to be profitable to do that?”
“Nope.”
I thought about this for a moment. “What about our customers?” I asked. “They’re rather loyal, you know.”
The two nearly choked themselves laughing. “As if,” one or the other snorted.
“This is ridiculous,” I said, rising from my chair. “You may make this work for a little while, but you can’t fool the public and the investment community forever.”
“Come on out, Larry,” they said. And out from underneath my porch, where he had been hiding, came a third individual. This one was gaunt and twitchy and less well dressed. “This is Larry,” said the VC. “He’s our journalist. He writes and blogs and appears at TED and provides pretty much daily support for our disruption. Without his tweets, we’d be nowhere. With it, we cannot fail.”
“But why would he do that?” I inquired, turning to him.
“I like disruption,” he said. “A lot.”
I’d had just about enough. “Get outta here!” I shouted. “And prepare for battle! We have resources. We make money! We won’t go quietly!”
“We’ll see,” said the disrupter. “Let’s go, boys.” They went. But I’m not kidding myself. I know they’ll be back. Which means, I guess, that summer as we know it is over. Let the conference calls begin. The strategy is clear. Disrupt the disrupters. How we get that done is up to us.
This story is from the August 12, 2013 issue of Coins2Day .