As the best ferryman on the East River, the last thing you want to see is the Brooklyn Bridge.
Cornelius Dircksen was a farmer in New York City when he noticed an opportunity. New York was growing as employees of the Dutch West India Company were spreading out from Manhattan, across the East River, into Brooklyn.
Cornelius offered service across the river, starting out in his three-passenger canoe, rowing back and forth between what is now Maiden Lane in Manhattan and Joralemon Street in Brooklyn.
It was a side hustle for Cornelius, who happened to own land on both sides of the river. With that experience on the water, he had no issues getting passengers and cargo across.
If you needed a ride, you’d find your way to the water’s edge and take hold of the horn that Cornelius had hung from a black birch. Give it a blow, and he would leave his work in the field and come to assist.
As demand grew, Cornelius moved the business, offering his ferry service through the traditional Native American route between Peck Slip and Wallabout Bay. The shorter distance between the two burrows improved efficiency. Of course, others noticed his growing enterprise and joined the industry. At its peak, 70 ferrymen were in operation on the East River. Cornelius scaled and expanded, adding a sailboat with more capacity and introducing additional offerings, an inn and tavern at the landing to serve his patrons.
A growing business in a growing city.
Disruption on the East River:
Eventually, though, he couldn’t keep up, and the ferry business was disrupted.
Larger ships started operation, including Robert Fulton’s Nassau Steamboat, a marvel in its time. The ferry companies started to consolidate into larger enterprises, and ferrymen went from 70 to 60, and then to twenty, while passenger numbers exploded.
But the Steamboat was eventually disrupted too.
Once the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the ferrymen were no longer needed. People and goods could cross the East River on demand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It carried 8.5 million people in year one, primarily by cable car. That number doubled to seventeen million in year two and doubled again to thirty-four million in year three. As of 2020, 116,000 vehicles, 30,000 pedestrians, and 3,000 cyclists travel the Brooklyn Bridge each day.
Technological disruption can bury an industry, seemingly overnight.
So, what happened to Cornelius Dircksen? What did he do when all the disruption crushed his business?
The truth is, although he may have seen it coming, he never saw it happen. Because it took almost three hundred years, and at that point, old Cornelius and his trusty canoe were dead and gone.
The original operation started in the 1640s. It wasn’t Manhattan at the time, it was New Amsterdam.
Small skiffs and sailboats followed, dodging larger vessels as they crossed.
A lot happened during those three hundred years. A war for one, with its own famous river crossing.
Team boats were used for a period, powered by horses or mules walking on a circular treadwheel that powered a paddle wheel, or an underwater screw. It was only a matter of time before they ditched the horses.
Fulton’s first steamboat hit the water in 1807, launching regular operations in 1812. For the first time, they could work on a schedule, not at the mercy of winds, tides, and livestock.
The Brooklyn Bridge didn’t open until 1883
The Fulton Ferry Company and their steamboats kept operations going until finally closing in 1924.
When we tell stories about disruption, it’s often faster than reality. It makes for a better story, but it doesn’t make it true.
A lot of disruption is slow. Like tectonic plates sliding along a fault line. Of course, there are moments of earth-shaking change, but often it’s the plodding but unstoppable kind of movement that makes real change.
Moneyball:
Bill James started developing sabermetrics in the seventies. It was a new way to use analytics in baseball. Using different statistics and more relevant data points, to better understand what was really impacting player and team performance.
He first published this work in The Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1977 and sold seventy-five copies. He sold 250 copies of the Second Edition in year two. By 1982 the annual publications sales had increased tenfold.
Prior to James’ work, scouts and owners were all chasing the same thing. What they called 5-tool players. Hit for average, hit for power, running speed, throwing strength with accuracy, and fielding skills.
Sabermetrics doesn’t devalue a 5-tool player, but it looks more deeply at the outcomes that those tools produce. The game of baseball is won by the team with the most runs, so any tools should be valued by their ability to score more runs for your team or allow fewer runs for the other team.
That’s it.
It doesn’t matter how much you can deadlift or how good-looking your girlfriend is.
A batter that walks and a batter that gets a single both end up on first base, so why value the hit any differently than the walk?
A defender might be fast but what if they are not getting a good jump on the ball? A slower outfielder may cover more area because of the ability to judge where the ball is going more quickly.
You don’t get extra runs for hitting it farther over the fence.
You don’t get extra runs for speed if you can’t get on base.
What sabermetrics allowed teams to do is look past the physical traits and inexact statistics. They could reevaluate the player that walks and gets the good jump and see that they were just as good as the more physically gifted player getting all the attention.
Obvious, right?
Sure, that’s why it took 40 years to gain popularity.
It wasn’t until the Oakland Athletics started racking up wins in the early 2000s that the world took notice. They were doing it with players the other teams had given up on.
Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was inspired by James’ work and applied sabermetric principles. The result? A small-budget team that could compete with big-budget franchises.
Baseball had been disrupted.
But it didn’t happen overnight. It took years for Beane’s methods to prove their worth and for other teams to start adopting similar strategies.
Even as the Billy Beane led A’s were winning more games than anyone thought was reasonable, people resisted. The scouts especially but the owners and players as well.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” What is the role of a scout if they can be replaced by a spreadsheet? And how does the classic 5-tool player feel when those spreadsheets tell their manager to replace them?
Author Michael Lewis, a Bay Area resident, had taken notice of the peculiar construction of his local ballclub. He decided to write about it and ended up popularizing a name for Sabermetrics that people could identify with.
Moneyball.
The book made an impact, but it would be another 8 years before the term really gained pop culture status. All it took was Brad Pitt. The movie came out in 2011 and Moneyball became a household term. Although Bill James had been focused on Baseball, the ideas he advocated were spreading throughout sports and business.
Scouts were replaced with statisticians and teams looked to uncover the true value of their players. They asked what players were undervalued, perhaps not gifted with the physical traits but impacting the game all the same.
Businesses were all looking for their Moneyball statistics. Looking past traditional numbers into what was really driving their business.
In movie form, the Moneyball story takes place in just 133 minutes.
That is all it took for Bill James to disrupt baseball, and eventually all of sports. That is what it took to go from seventy-five copies sold from a print ad in the back of the Sporting News, to Brad Pitt (and Jonah Hill). If that’s all you know about Moneyball it probably felt like things changed overnight. James knows differently though; it was the slow disruption that he nurtured over 40 years and turned into his lifeswork.
When we tell stories about disruption, it’s often faster than reality. It makes for a better story, but it doesn’t make it true.
And how prevalent is it now?
The last ad I was served on X.com was for Statcast, a service that provides real-time in-game statistics on anything from spin rate to exit velocity to hit probability.
Electrification:
Just a few months after Billy Beane’s Moneyball team had been eliminated from the playoffs, Tesla Motors was founded.
Tesla is now leading the disruption of the automobile industry through its production of electric vehicles.
It feels like the prevalence of Tesla and other EVs has been on a 20-year run with growing momentum, and if that’s where you think the story starts, the disruption looks fast. A scrappy startup takes on Detroit and wins. But Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car. He wasn’t even close.
Gustave Trouvé‘s showcased the first electric car, a tricycle, in 1881, two years before the Brooklyn Bridge opened.
The same year that Billy Beane took over as general manager of the A’s, Amazon.com went public. It feels like e-commerce started right then and there, but Sears sent their first mailer out in 1888, later expanding into a full catalog. The first editions focused on small items such as watches and jewelry, but they later expanded, selling items as large as homes. If the stars aligned, they could have sold Trouvé’s tricycle. Amazon digitized the catalog, started with a focus on books instead of watches, but the underlying infrastructure had been growing for over 100 years.
None of this means that disruption isn’t happening, it’s just that the change is not as fast as we might think.
When we tell stories about disruption, it’s often faster than reality. It makes for a better story, but it doesn’t make it true.
The year is 2029, and Kyle Reese is sent back in time to save Sarah Connor from the Terminator. I know what you’re thinking, 2029 is right around the corner and the AI is already damn good.
I agree, but Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997.
In my simulation, I could hardly get the Yahoo home page to load in 1997.
Slow Disruption:
Disruption often starts on the fringes. It’s the outsiders — people like Cornelius Dircksen and Bill James — who see things differently and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. People who aren’t afraid to get things started with a side hustle.
Kevin Kelly said, “The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.” In other words, disruption starts on the fringes where it can be mostly ignored, and then it slowly works its way into the mainstream.
The idea that we’ll step out of the house one day and the world will look totally different makes for a great story, but it’s inconsistent with reality.
Disruption is rarely a sudden event. It’s a process that unfolds over time. It starts with an innovative idea, but it takes time for that idea to prove its worth and gain acceptance.
Disruption is about more than just technology. It’s about finding better ways to meet human needs. Getting people from point A to point B is not about methods it is about outcomes. Same with winning ballgames.
Disruption is about improving people’s lives whether it’s through engineering, electrification, or e-commerce.
Ferrymen might turn into bridge builders, but more than likely they’ll live out their days as they have, and watch the next generation drill those piles into the floor of the East River.
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