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The Basecamp (née 37Signals) folks have been beating this drum for quite some time. DHH posted "Reconsider" to their blog today, actually; it's an entertaining

The Basecamp (née 37Signals) folks have been beating this drum for quite some time. DHH posted "Reconsider" to their blog today, actually; it's an entertaining read, if nothing else: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider Here in Seattle, there's a great community of small software businesses with meaningful profits and impact. We have ties to the broader Seattle startup and technology community, without being a proper subset. I don't see it as an either-or proposition. Right funding for the right business, as it were.

TranquilMarmot 11y ago
How can I find jobs for small software business like that (especially in Seattle!)? I want to work in a smaller environment that's not necessarily trying to be a "unicorn", but those seem to be the only jobs posted here on HN for "Who's hiring?". On other job boards, I mostly just see larger corporations hiring worker drones. I just want to write good software that solves interesting problems and make enough money to get by!
- aeden 11y ago
  It's really up to you to go out and find them. I suggest looking for local meetups and talking to engineers who are working in those small businesses. Get to know the people in your community running these small businesses. Most of our hires were introduced through people I know. In a small business this is often the only logical way to hire because you already have some level of trust with the referrer and thus they've acted as the first gateway for a candidate to get through (and they usually can vouch for the candidate's work). Also, many small businesses are concerned largely with staying alive and making a profit, so that may mean they will be focused on "non-interesting" problems of making the business operate well. Factor this into your decision as to who you want to work for as well.
  - m_fayer 11y ago
    I'll second this, it really is a "scene." When hiring or looking for contract work, people reach out to their network first and it almost always produces someone. Reaching out to the open market is seen as a last resort and rarely happens. Also, chatting with random people at coworking spaces could be fruitful.
  - TranquilMarmot 11y ago
    I guess that's the issue- where I'm living right now, there is absolutely no "tech scene". There are no local meetups that don't require me driving 1.5+ hours one way to get to, which I can't manage to do on a regular basis. I'd love to move somewhere where there's more people who are like-minded, but I can't just up and move without a job waiting for me. The general consensus I'm hearing is that the way you get hired at a smaller company is just through networking, but if there's no network near me to speak of am I just simply out of luck? And yes, I'm aware that I will have to work on some "non-interesting" problems, but I'm okay with that as long as I feel like my work is being valued by my coworkers and that I'm not just another drone.
- roel_v 11y ago
  If you think that at a lifestyle business you can just philosophize about 'architecture', write 3 prototypes and hone every last function for aesthetics, you're sadly mistaken. When you're small everyone has to do everything, you need to ship so bills can be paid, and customers are always nr 1, not the software. I like 'small' too, but it's not like working at a lifestyle business is like having tenure. Owning one that has plenty of cash at hand might be, but working for one isn't.
- tomcam 11y ago
  When I worked for other people I had great success by cold-calling firms that interested me and that I felt could use my skills. They didn't always have job listings but they liked my genuine interest in their products.
- senderista 11y ago
  If you're in Seattle, have you looked at software engineering positions at the UW? You can find plenty of interesting problems to work on, with world-class peers in the faculty and students.
rcarrigan87 11y ago
I was surprised that article didn't trigger a bigger response on HN. It is a little over the top, but it leaves a lot to think about. The Unicorn, disruption PR wheel has drowned out the virtues and benefits of other forms of entrepreneurship.
- nl 11y ago
  For me personally I tend to ignore most of what DHH writes. He has an unfortunate tendency to see the way that he was successful as the only way to be successful, and seems to lack the ability to benefits in other ways of doing things. We used to see this in PG's writings too: back before he started YC he appeared to be utterly convinced that it was Lisp that made his company successful. After he started YC and he saw a lot more his writing became a lot stronger IMO. Regarding DHH, I'll just point at [1], with the comment that Facebook made $891 profit last quarter. It's also currently valued at ~$300B. [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000 https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
  - tdicola 11y ago
    > Regarding DHH, I'll just point at [1], with the comment that Facebook made $891 profit last quarter. It's also currently valued at ~$300B. > [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33.. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33.... To be fair that blog post was written in 2010 when Facebook was still a private company and had nowhere near the level of advertising, reach, etc. that it has today. In particular they had barely scratched the surface of mobile and were only making money off Farmville and other ephemeral apps.
    - nl 11y ago
      That's kind of the point!! The trajectory was clear enough that all those investors DHH called "star struck" put money in. To quote him: Irrational investor exuberance indeed. I think it would be more sensible to class them as "investors who had more foresight than DHH". He berated them for being dumb. Since we can now see that they weren't dumb at all we should consider DHH's insights questionable.
amelius 11y ago
I think what this essay overlooked is that the choice between a "low-risk but small business path" and a "high-risk unicorn path" is not always merely about business-choices and cornering markets simply by using large sums of money. A different "high-risk unicorn path" is going through hard scientific research, which often requires external money to get anything from the ground. And it is this last type of business that, imho, deserves our respect most. But otherwise I agree with that article.
- m_fayer 11y ago
  I think "unicorn" is strictly reserved for the Ubers and the AirBNBs of the world. Anyone who calls the company that gets fusion energy working a "unicorn" will probably be laughed out of the room.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    It seems like Aileen Lee was one of the first people to popularize unicorns. in his article around 2013[0] he defines them as > We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups. That being said, the term is now almost a pejorative moniker for overpriced vaporware or at least "proof of the bubble". or something. Still though, a fusion company would be the rare breakthrough on a big idea that would warrant such a moniker. Unicorns missed the ark during the great flood, so at IPO time we'll see if tgey go extinct or evolve into narwhals. 0 http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club...
    - goodJobWalrus 11y ago
      >in his article around 2013[0] he defines them Aileen is a woman.
      - vonklaus 11y ago
swamp40 11y ago
Too funny! From DHH's blog post: Angels? Really? You’ve plucked your self-serving moniker from the parables of a religion that specifically and explicitly had its head honcho throw the money men out of the temple and proclaim a rich man less likely to make it into heaven than a camel through a needle’s eye. Okay then!
trdm 11y ago
That "Reconsider" post was at the top of HN yesterday(1) but it was quickly removed from the front page(2). What a coincidence. DHH's "Reconsider": "Our definition of winning didn’t even include establishing that hallowed sanctity of the natural monopoly!" Sam's "Playbook": "We also ask how the company will one day be a monopoly." (1)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 (2)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508269
- ekanes 11y ago
  There's plenty of room for both models. Lifestyle businesses are awesome. 100% great. But we wouldn't have society-level upgrades like Uber, Twitter or Apple without venture capital. They just don't work any other way.
  - billmalarky 11y ago
    Sometimes they do. Wikipedia comes to mind. Your point is still valid though.
  - societylevel 11y ago
    I disagree strongly. We have the web because Tim Berners-Lee didn't raise an angel round, so he didn't ask 'how do I monetize' and built an amazing open system. Before him we had CompuServe and other VC backed trash. VC businesses like Twitter and Uber create centralized points of stagnation that seem great at first, but can't innovate the way open systems can. If Twitter was open we wouldn't be wondering if they'll improve their product or who will be CEO, because there'd be a dozen people innovating on it. Instead, because the network is owned by one group of people, that basically doesn't happen. We still get that sort of amazing, eco-system creating innovation when a rare innovator declines VC (wikipedia, bitcoin). But when a VC steps in, the only innovations that flourish are those that benefit the capitalist. Venture capital is, ironically, the enemy of innovation. It doesn't support it; it captures it and restrains it, tying it down with the bonds of capital.
    - 11y ago
rconti 11y ago
Thanks for reposting this, I didn't see it the first time around. Many of the pro-startup stuff I see, in particular this Altman piece, make me subtly uncomfortable, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's because, while I live in the Valley, I'm a Seattle native. Maybe it's because Sam's younger than I am. Maybe it's because I like the suburbs better than San Francisco proper. Maybe it's because I'm not an Ideas guy; this isn't targeted at me because I have no interest in starting a company and dedicating every second of my waking life to it. That's why I was hesitant to comment at all. "Of course you're uncomfortable with it," the reply to my comment would read, "you non-disruptive loser" it would end. For those who want a unicorn valuation, I'm sure Sam's piece is great. Or maybe it's not, I don't know. But what I do know is he kept mentioning how competition never kills startups. It's failure to execute. Why balance burnout and cashflow and hiring and funding in some kind of race to become a unicorn if competitors won't actually kill you? Why not grow at a reasonable pace, running a reasonable business, that makes reasonable money?
- bjwbell 11y ago
  Results don't scale linearly with effort. I don't know if it's worth it.
  - MoOmer 11y ago
    I should do a blogpost about the small business I took over from my dad, and the impact it had.
    - TodPunk 11y ago
      Yes, yes you should.
- chipsy 11y ago
  I think the advice re. competitors tends to be about "how much should you worry about what a competitor is doing _right now_" - and the answer to that is pretty much always "not a whole lot." You can have two businesses doing similar things but taking radically different approaches to execution and both succeeding in their own way. But on the macro scale there are always windows of opening and closing opportunity on what makes for a viable business before (new technology takes over/bigger companies start paying attention/governments try to regulate you out of existence), and it is that more general climate of whether it's possible to execute at all that pressures the potential unicorns into a do-or-die mode. Monopolistic competition like e.g. Uber vs. Lyft is an exceptional case for technology; the expectation is that if you succeed at all you will probably be in complete control until the technology ecosystem itself shifts. There is a second half to this, of course, which is that the type of people who found a fast-moving VC-backed startup are so deeply enmeshed in their plans for the company that they will put themselves into an unsustainable overdrive and expect everyone around them to do the same. Their enthusiasm can be entirely real and still be basically toxic and lacking in conservative sensibility. There are a lot of commonalities among founder personalities, IME.
trymas 11y ago
Ah yes. Refreshing read. Thank you. I am long time thinking and saying, that modern startups have rather poisonous culture around them. It's very refreshing to read who thinks (and writes) about it.
mattlutze 11y ago
> I wanted a life beyond work. Hobbies, family, and intellectual stimulation and pursuits beyond Hacker News, what the next-next-next JavaScript framework looks like, and how we can optimize our signup funnel. > and pursuits beyond Hacker News What foreign language is this?

TranquilMarmot 11y ago

How can I find jobs for small software business like that (especially in Seattle!)? I want to work in a smaller environment that's not necessarily trying to be a "unicorn", but those seem to be the only jobs posted here on HN for "Who's hiring?". On other job boards, I mostly just see larger corporations hiring worker drones. I just want to write good software that solves interesting problems and make enough money to get by!

aeden 11y ago
It's really up to you to go out and find them. I suggest looking for local meetups and talking to engineers who are working in those small businesses. Get to know the people in your community running these small businesses. Most of our hires were introduced through people I know. In a small business this is often the only logical way to hire because you already have some level of trust with the referrer and thus they've acted as the first gateway for a candidate to get through (and they usually can vouch for the candidate's work). Also, many small businesses are concerned largely with staying alive and making a profit, so that may mean they will be focused on "non-interesting" problems of making the business operate well. Factor this into your decision as to who you want to work for as well.
- m_fayer 11y ago
  I'll second this, it really is a "scene." When hiring or looking for contract work, people reach out to their network first and it almost always produces someone. Reaching out to the open market is seen as a last resort and rarely happens. Also, chatting with random people at coworking spaces could be fruitful.
- TranquilMarmot 11y ago
  I guess that's the issue- where I'm living right now, there is absolutely no "tech scene". There are no local meetups that don't require me driving 1.5+ hours one way to get to, which I can't manage to do on a regular basis. I'd love to move somewhere where there's more people who are like-minded, but I can't just up and move without a job waiting for me. The general consensus I'm hearing is that the way you get hired at a smaller company is just through networking, but if there's no network near me to speak of am I just simply out of luck? And yes, I'm aware that I will have to work on some "non-interesting" problems, but I'm okay with that as long as I feel like my work is being valued by my coworkers and that I'm not just another drone.
roel_v 11y ago
If you think that at a lifestyle business you can just philosophize about 'architecture', write 3 prototypes and hone every last function for aesthetics, you're sadly mistaken. When you're small everyone has to do everything, you need to ship so bills can be paid, and customers are always nr 1, not the software. I like 'small' too, but it's not like working at a lifestyle business is like having tenure. Owning one that has plenty of cash at hand might be, but working for one isn't.
tomcam 11y ago
When I worked for other people I had great success by cold-calling firms that interested me and that I felt could use my skills. They didn't always have job listings but they liked my genuine interest in their products.
senderista 11y ago
If you're in Seattle, have you looked at software engineering positions at the UW? You can find plenty of interesting problems to work on, with world-class peers in the faculty and students.

rcarrigan87 11y ago

I was surprised that article didn't trigger a bigger response on HN. It is a little over the top, but it leaves a lot to think about. The Unicorn, disruption PR wheel has drowned out the virtues and benefits of other forms of entrepreneurship.

nl 11y ago
For me personally I tend to ignore most of what DHH writes. He has an unfortunate tendency to see the way that he was successful as the only way to be successful, and seems to lack the ability to benefits in other ways of doing things. We used to see this in PG's writings too: back before he started YC he appeared to be utterly convinced that it was Lisp that made his company successful. After he started YC and he saw a lot more his writing became a lot stronger IMO. Regarding DHH, I'll just point at [1], with the comment that Facebook made $891 profit last quarter. It's also currently valued at ~$300B. [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000 https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
- tdicola 11y ago
  > Regarding DHH, I'll just point at [1], with the comment that Facebook made $891 profit last quarter. It's also currently valued at ~$300B. > [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33.. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33.... To be fair that blog post was written in 2010 when Facebook was still a private company and had nowhere near the level of advertising, reach, etc. that it has today. In particular they had barely scratched the surface of mobile and were only making money off Farmville and other ephemeral apps.
  - nl 11y ago
    That's kind of the point!! The trajectory was clear enough that all those investors DHH called "star struck" put money in. To quote him: Irrational investor exuberance indeed. I think it would be more sensible to class them as "investors who had more foresight than DHH". He berated them for being dumb. Since we can now see that they weren't dumb at all we should consider DHH's insights questionable.

amelius 11y ago

I think what this essay overlooked is that the choice between a "low-risk but small business path" and a "high-risk unicorn path" is not always merely about business-choices and cornering markets simply by using large sums of money. A different "high-risk unicorn path" is going through hard scientific research, which often requires external money to get anything from the ground. And it is this last type of business that, imho, deserves our respect most. But otherwise I agree with that article.

m_fayer 11y ago
I think "unicorn" is strictly reserved for the Ubers and the AirBNBs of the world. Anyone who calls the company that gets fusion energy working a "unicorn" will probably be laughed out of the room.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  It seems like Aileen Lee was one of the first people to popularize unicorns. in his article around 2013[0] he defines them as > We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups. That being said, the term is now almost a pejorative moniker for overpriced vaporware or at least "proof of the bubble". or something. Still though, a fusion company would be the rare breakthrough on a big idea that would warrant such a moniker. Unicorns missed the ark during the great flood, so at IPO time we'll see if tgey go extinct or evolve into narwhals. 0 http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club...
  - goodJobWalrus 11y ago
    >in his article around 2013[0] he defines them Aileen is a woman.
    - vonklaus 11y ago

swamp40 11y ago

Too funny! From DHH's blog post: Angels? Really? You’ve plucked your self-serving moniker from the parables of a religion that specifically and explicitly had its head honcho throw the money men out of the temple and proclaim a rich man less likely to make it into heaven than a camel through a needle’s eye. Okay then!

trdm 11y ago

That "Reconsider" post was at the top of HN yesterday(1) but it was quickly removed from the front page(2). What a coincidence. DHH's "Reconsider": "Our definition of winning didn’t even include establishing that hallowed sanctity of the natural monopoly!" Sam's "Playbook": "We also ask how the company will one day be a monopoly." (1)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 (2)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508269

ekanes 11y ago
There's plenty of room for both models. Lifestyle businesses are awesome. 100% great. But we wouldn't have society-level upgrades like Uber, Twitter or Apple without venture capital. They just don't work any other way.
- billmalarky 11y ago
  Sometimes they do. Wikipedia comes to mind. Your point is still valid though.
- societylevel 11y ago
  I disagree strongly. We have the web because Tim Berners-Lee didn't raise an angel round, so he didn't ask 'how do I monetize' and built an amazing open system. Before him we had CompuServe and other VC backed trash. VC businesses like Twitter and Uber create centralized points of stagnation that seem great at first, but can't innovate the way open systems can. If Twitter was open we wouldn't be wondering if they'll improve their product or who will be CEO, because there'd be a dozen people innovating on it. Instead, because the network is owned by one group of people, that basically doesn't happen. We still get that sort of amazing, eco-system creating innovation when a rare innovator declines VC (wikipedia, bitcoin). But when a VC steps in, the only innovations that flourish are those that benefit the capitalist. Venture capital is, ironically, the enemy of innovation. It doesn't support it; it captures it and restrains it, tying it down with the bonds of capital.
  - 11y ago

rconti 11y ago

Thanks for reposting this, I didn't see it the first time around. Many of the pro-startup stuff I see, in particular this Altman piece, make me subtly uncomfortable, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's because, while I live in the Valley, I'm a Seattle native. Maybe it's because Sam's younger than I am. Maybe it's because I like the suburbs better than San Francisco proper. Maybe it's because I'm not an Ideas guy; this isn't targeted at me because I have no interest in starting a company and dedicating every second of my waking life to it. That's why I was hesitant to comment at all. "Of course you're uncomfortable with it," the reply to my comment would read, "you non-disruptive loser" it would end. For those who want a unicorn valuation, I'm sure Sam's piece is great. Or maybe it's not, I don't know. But what I do know is he kept mentioning how competition never kills startups. It's failure to execute. Why balance burnout and cashflow and hiring and funding in some kind of race to become a unicorn if competitors won't actually kill you? Why not grow at a reasonable pace, running a reasonable business, that makes reasonable money?

bjwbell 11y ago
Results don't scale linearly with effort. I don't know if it's worth it.
- MoOmer 11y ago
  I should do a blogpost about the small business I took over from my dad, and the impact it had.
  - TodPunk 11y ago
    Yes, yes you should.
chipsy 11y ago
I think the advice re. competitors tends to be about "how much should you worry about what a competitor is doing _right now_" - and the answer to that is pretty much always "not a whole lot." You can have two businesses doing similar things but taking radically different approaches to execution and both succeeding in their own way. But on the macro scale there are always windows of opening and closing opportunity on what makes for a viable business before (new technology takes over/bigger companies start paying attention/governments try to regulate you out of existence), and it is that more general climate of whether it's possible to execute at all that pressures the potential unicorns into a do-or-die mode. Monopolistic competition like e.g. Uber vs. Lyft is an exceptional case for technology; the expectation is that if you succeed at all you will probably be in complete control until the technology ecosystem itself shifts. There is a second half to this, of course, which is that the type of people who found a fast-moving VC-backed startup are so deeply enmeshed in their plans for the company that they will put themselves into an unsustainable overdrive and expect everyone around them to do the same. Their enthusiasm can be entirely real and still be basically toxic and lacking in conservative sensibility. There are a lot of commonalities among founder personalities, IME.

trymas 11y ago

Ah yes. Refreshing read. Thank you. I am long time thinking and saying, that modern startups have rather poisonous culture around them. It's very refreshing to read who thinks (and writes) about it.

mattlutze 11y ago

> I wanted a life beyond work. Hobbies, family, and intellectual stimulation and pursuits beyond Hacker News, what the next-next-next JavaScript framework looks like, and how we can optimize our signup funnel. > and pursuits beyond Hacker News What foreign language is this?