The Obsession with 'Disruption': Why Your Slightly Different App Is Not the Wheel
Your £300 Hoodie Won't Make Your Sandwich App Revolutionary
There’s a particular type of bloke who shows up at the corner shop near my house wearing £300 trainers and a hoodie that costs more than my monthly council tax, fumbling with his phone to pay for a Meal Deal.
He taps his screen about seven times, frowns at whatever app he’s using, then gives up and uses his contactless card like a normal human being. Every single time. I’ve watched this happen twice a week for months now, and I’m starting to think he’s either deeply committed to proving a point about the future of payments or he’s just spectacularly thick.
Last time, he actually apologised to the shopkeeper. “Sorry mate,” he said, “still working out the bugs in our payment platform. We’re disrupting the checkout experience.” The shopkeeper, a bloke called Ahmed who’s run that shop for twenty years, just looked at him with the weary patience of someone who’s seen every flavour of bollocks humanity has to offer. “The card machine works fine,” he said.
That’s when it hit me. We’ve created an entire industry of people who genuinely believe that making something slightly different, slightly more complicated, and significantly less reliable than what already exists counts as innovation. And they’re not just doing it quietly in their bedrooms. They’re raising millions in venture capital, giving TED talks, and wearing jumpers that look like they were designed by someone who’d only ever had clothes described to them over a bad phone connection.
Revolutionary Marginal Improvement
I spent decades inside tech companies watching this performance, and I can tell you exactly how it works.
Someone has an idea that’s essentially “what if we took this thing that already functions perfectly well and made it worse, but with an app?” They write a pitch deck full of words like “Disruption” and “AI-enabled” and “paradigm shift” and “exponential growth” and maybe even “revolutionary blockchain-enabled solution” for good measure.
They find investors who’ve made so much money they’ve lost all connection to how normal humans actually live. And then they build something that solves a problem nobody had, while creating seventeen new problems in the process.
The jumper thing isn’t incidental, by the way. It’s part of the uniform. There’s a very specific look that tech entrepreneurs adopt when they want to signal that they’re “disrupting” something: expensive casual wear that costs a fortune but looks like they grabbed it from a charity shop in the dark. Hoodies that cost £400. Trainers that look like they were designed by a committee of colour-blind toddlers. Jeans that fit like they belong to someone three sizes larger. It’s calculated scruffiness, and it’s meant to say “I’m so focused on changing the world that I can’t be bothered with trivial things like looking like an adult.” What it actually says is “I have no brain.”
The Mechanism of Meaningless Innovation
The venture capital system is designed to find the next Google or Facebook or whatever massive company made everyone obscenely wealthy. The problem is that genuinely revolutionary innovations are vanishingly rare. Most of the time, most technology is just incremental improvements on existing solutions. Which is fine. Incremental improvements are useful. Society benefits from things getting slightly better over time.
But you can’t raise £50 million in venture capital by saying “we’ve made sandwiches 3% more convenient.” You need to claim you’re fundamentally changing how humanity interacts with food. You need to talk about “vertically integrated artisanal protein delivery” and “disrupting the legacy lunch paradigm.” You need to convince investors that this isn’t just a sandwich shop with an app, it’s a platform for transforming human sustenance.
So everyone lies. Not maliciously, necessarily. They’ve just internalised a language where every tiny modification is a revolution, every new feature is paradigm-shifting, every competitor’s product is “legacy” and “outdated.”
I’ve been in meetings where grown adults with engineering degrees seriously discussed how their app for ordering coffee was going to “fundamentally transform the human relationship with caffeine.” It was a button that said “order coffee.” That’s it. But calling it a button wouldn’t get funding.
The really insidious part is that after a while, they start believing their own nonsense. I’ve watched founders convince themselves that their marginally different approach to a solved problem is genuinely innovative because everyone around them keeps using innovation language. It’s like a cargo cult where if you wear the right jumper and use the right words and pitch the right investors, actual innovation will manifest through sheer force of expensive cashmere and confident bullshitting.
And the thing is, occasionally it works. Occasionally, one of these “disruptive” companies actually stumbles into something useful, which then retroactively justifies all the other ones. It’s survivorship bias on an industrial scale. For every Uber or Airbnb that actually changed how an industry works (whether that change was good is a different question), there are ten thousand apps that promised to revolutionise shoe shopping or disrupt the pencil industry and then quietly disappeared after burning through millions of pounds of other people’s money.
What I Actually Watch For Now
This won’t make you immune to hype, because humans are fundamentally susceptible to confident people in expensive knitwear telling them the future has arrived, but it might help you avoid the worst of it.
First: Ask what problem this actually solves. Not the problem they claim to solve in their pitch deck, but the actual real-world problem. I use this simple test now: would I pay for this with my own money to solve a problem I currently have? Not “would it be nice to have,” not “might I use it if it was free,” but would I actually give someone cash because my life is measurably worse without it?
Second: Check if the “disruption” is just adding unnecessary complexity. This is the big one I wish I’d learned earlier. Real innovation usually makes things simpler, not more complicated. The iPhone was disruptive because it made smartphones easier to use, not harder. Most “disruptive” apps I see now make things more complicated. They require downloading an app, creating an account, granting permissions, learning a new interface, and then using that interface to do something you could have done just as fast the old way.
Third: Watch for solutions that create dependency. I’ve become deeply suspicious of any innovation that requires you to commit to their ecosystem before you can evaluate whether it actually works. Companies that want to “disrupt” your entire workflow by having you migrate all your data to their platform, learn their specific way of doing things, and integrate with their suite of tools. Because once you’re locked in, once you’ve invested the time and effort to switch, the quality of the actual product becomes almost irrelevant. They’ve got you.
Be wary, very wary. Each one will promise to revolutionise how you work. Each one will mean learning a new way to do stuff, and each one will eventually be enshittified once they have enough users that they don’t have to try anymore.
Fourth: Evaluate the jumper-to-substance ratio. I’m half joking here, but only half. Be immediately suspicious of anyone whose presentation focuses more on their personal brand than their actual product. If the founder spends more time talking about their journey, their vision, their disruption of traditional thinking, and less time showing me a working product that solves a real problem, that’s a red flag the size of a weather balloon.
The most useful innovations I’ve encountered were usually presented by deeply boring people in normal clothes who just wanted to show you the thing they’d built and how it worked. The least useful were presented by charismatic blokes in £800 hoodies who wanted to tell you about paradigm shifts.
The Beige Future of Incremental Nothing
I still see that bloke at the corner shop, still wearing clothes that cost more than a reasonable used car. His company folded last month, apparently. Something about failure to achieve product-market fit, which is venture capital speak for “nobody wanted this.”
Ahmed’s still there, still selling Meal Deals, still accepting perfectly functional contactless payments from cards that work every single time. He didn’t need disrupting. None of us did. We needed sandwiches and working payment systems and maybe, just maybe, for people with too much money and expensive jumpers to occasionally ask themselves whether making something different was the same as making it better.
But that would require admitting that most innovation is just incremental improvement dressed up in revolutionary language, and you can’t raise millions on incremental improvement. You need disruption. You need sea change. You need to convince investors that your mediocre idea is going to change everything, and the easiest way to do that is to dress like you’ve already changed everything and just haven’t told anyone yet.
The jumpers aren’t getting any better, by the way. If anything, they’re getting worse. I saw one last week that looked like someone had felted a particularly aggressive sheep and then charged £600 for the results. The bloke wearing it was explaining how his new startup was going to disrupt the sock industry.
I’m sure it’ll be revolutionary.