Success Quote by David Geffen

Geffen’s “abysmal” isn’t a data point; it’s a provocation from someone who built empires in industries where gatekeepers were visible, negotiable, and occasionally beatable. Coming from a mogul who thrived on taste, timing, and leverage, the line reads less like despair and more like indictment: the rules have changed, and not in the romantic way Silicon Valley mythology keeps selling.

The intent is to puncture the startup fairy tale. “From scratch” is the loaded phrase. It implies not just launching a product, but entering a market without inherited distribution, preexisting capital networks, celebrity oxygen, or platform privilege. Geffen’s subtext is that modern entrepreneurship has been quietly re-feudalized. The old barriers were record labels, studios, radio programmers. Today’s are monopolistic platforms, pay-to-play discovery, winner-take-all network effects, and a funding environment that rewards founders who already look fundable.

Context matters: Geffen’s career sits at the intersection of art and commerce, where a scrappy outsider could still carve space by outmaneuvering incumbents. He’s watching a landscape where incumbents are not just competitors but infrastructure: app stores, ad exchanges, streaming algorithms, cloud ecosystems. Starting “from scratch” now often means renting the entire stack from the very giants you’d need to disrupt, while competing against their bundled advantages.

The cynicism lands because it’s half confession. If even Geffen, patron saint of the self-made deal, calls the entry point “abysmal,” it suggests the myth of open opportunity is doing more work than the reality.