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Sure! Looking for ways to burn through $4M in cash, even my 12 year old nephew will come up with some way! I bet I could do it with half the staff in have the t
by mjnaus 19y ago
Sure! Looking for ways to burn through $4M in cash, even my 12 year old nephew will come up with some way! I bet I could do it with half the staff in have the time. Pissing away money is easy. However, this doesn't makes it good business.
And when you're already planning to take three years to come up with a business model, FOR GODS SAKE drop the whole thing and do something useful with your time and other peoples money.
- jgrahamc 19y agoHave you run a technology start-up to the point where it's profitable? My experience is that it takes a lot longer than anyone thinks.
- mjnaus 19y agoIf Scribd would be a technology startup in the sense that it would leverage NEW technology or develop NEW technology, it would make sense for it to take a longer period of time to become profitable. However, Scribd is just another company leveraging the internet delivering a service to their customers. Nothing great and nothing fancy going on there and if the idea would indeed be worth the effort, they should have no problem starting of profitable or getting it profitable within the first year of operation.
- jgrahamc 19y agoSo you don't count iPaper as technology?
- apathy 19y agoScribd is just another company leveraging the internet delivering a service to their customers. You mean like Amazon, or eBay, or Google? None of those companies make much of anything either. Good point on responsiveness, my experience is that even pain-in-the-ass customers are important. Sometimes they're the most important ones over the long haul. But you're still a pain in the ass ;-)
- staunch 19y agoIt's not just coming up with a business model that's hard. You need enough time to become fully self-sustaining and then profitable. Anyone who thinks it's outrageous to have $4M to fund a company for years is going to have a heart attack after reading Crunchbase for five minutes.
- apathy 19y agoyeah, but TechCrunch is practically a gallery of fuckedness.
- parker 19y agoI don't think you should condemn every company that raises material capital. However, I know first hand that some companies definitely should not have raised capital, and were resting on the laurels of a previous success and a well-known name. These companies really haven't thought enough about what problem they're actually solving, and are almost arrogant about what the market really needs. "Of course the market will want this, because I'm awesome" syndrome. In short, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater... there are plenty of companies that need that kind of capital that are doing great things. And if I had to guess, I'd bet that Scribd was one of them.