The word ‘disrupt’ is one of those pervasive buzzwords from Silicon Valley that gets overused a lot. It’s practically gospel in some circles.

Another one is when media publications like Buzzfeed and the Daily Mail use phrases like ‘breaking the internet’ or ‘the internet is freaking over this’ in their headlines. This usually just translates to: “a few people are talking about this on Twitter and it might be interesting to some of you lazy lot on Facebook.” Clickbait at its worst.

Unicorns Everywhere

I sometimes get cold pitches in my inbox, often using ‘disruption’ as a unique factor for their pitch, and I involuntarily roll my eyes every time. Points to the startup for trying - it’s a hard-knock life out there after all, but what was once a useful concept is now just meaningless to me and every other poor sap out there.

Few people actually know what the word ‘disrupt’ means, too; they mistake better products for disruptive ones. Harvard professor Clay Christensen defines disruption as “the process by which technologically straightforward services and products target the bottom end of an established market, then move their way up the chain until, eventually, they overtake the existing market leaders.”

This Company is Uber for X

So, companies like Uber and Netflix qualify here. But the word can’t apply to every startup - it distracts us, and makes it harder to differentiate from the companies who have a product worth looking at. Sometimes these startups even get caught up in the disruption process, trying to compete with other companies.

So let’s stop trying to disrupt. Let’s create.

Photo courtesy of mashable.com.