9 ms·

The business culture defined in this post is really freaky, to say the least. You can't point me to one other industry where you can start selling shit w/o "kn

by gkya 8y ago

The business culture defined in this post is really freaky, to say the least. You can't point me to one other industry where you can start selling shit w/o "knowing what you're doing". Or if you can't sell your things you lure people in with free stuff and sneakily fuck them up w/o no laws to work around which protect them. Simply and brutally put: if you are incompetent and/or malevolent in your business practices and for that reason your business faces existencial threat from a piece of regulation that codifies the ideal setting for the industry, your business better dies ASAP. I want that just like you can't have a random person design cars, architect buildings or teach our kids, similarly a random person cannot code up a commercial/government web site where they were "learning as I went along"; and an enterprise that can't afford to consult a lawyer can not get their hands on people's private data that they'd rather not change throughout their lives. Entrepreneurs to the hell, the amount of irresponsibility some people posting here want conceded to them is mind-boggling. I really hope that the upcoming decade will bring some sanity to this wild-west of an industry where who don't know what they are fucking doing can't just go out and handle stuff that they should not be allowed to even observe with a telescope from miles and miles away.

auganov 8y ago
This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades. You can't point me to one other industry which enjoyed as much success. Of course, Europe couldn't care less - they never had a real startup industry in the first place.
- lou1306 8y ago
  > This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades. So what? Communism turned feudal Russia into a world superpower in less than 2 decades. Do the ends justify the means?
  - auganov 8y ago
    Not making a moral argument. @gkya's comment paints a picture where entrepreneurs unhappy with GDPR are perhaps just a small contingent of incompetent amateurs who shouldn't be doing business in the first place. While I, in agreement with OC/OP, see it as a threat to the entire industry.
    - gkya 8y ago
      Nearly, what I think is that, those unhappy with GDPR are either malevolent actors or incompetent people. And I think the bar to entry to the industry should be elevated (while bar to entry to learning ones way to that bar and to hacking should always be as low as possible; but you can't hack together and end user product, period). BTW I'm not in the US not in a country where GDPR is effective. But I CRAVE that my country implement the same measures or better. Unfortunately that's unlikely. Finally, it's a threat to the bad part of the industry. And then there are those who exaggerate the situation while they are not really affected by the regulation. But the hysteria will diminish and hopefully most of the bad actors wil either change their business or just go out of the industry, searching for other places to exploit (which hopefully they will not find).
- baby 8y ago
  driving innovation while having the biggest number of homeless people in the streets and no health care.
  - tripzilch 8y ago
    the land of the 98% free!
  - SuperNinKenDo 8y ago
    Not even close[0] There is healthcare in America[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... [1] Doesn't actually need a source
    - shados 8y ago
      Holy shit. As a Canadian who moved to the US, that was quite surprising. Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem. I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...
      - SuperNinKenDo 8y ago
        Yeah I'm not sure. The presence of homeless people seems to be far more a function of how aggressive the government is at removing them than anything else. Melbourne is absolutely packed with homeless, but Sydney far less so, and I have a feeling it's not because of Sydney's cheap rent[0] or a lack of broken homes in the city. I suspect such a business oriented, conservative city is just more tough on its homeless. [0] Sydney rents are insanely steep
    - gkya 8y ago
      I don't think the commenter meant healthcare as in hospitals and medicine being available; AFAIK the US has nothing like what most other countries has where it is facilitated for most or all citizens to access health care at minimum or no costs.
- cerebellum42 8y ago
  The other side of this is that the GDPR puts all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations to speak of in front of a choice to either stop doing business with a huge market or actually stop ignoring privacy concerns. The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. Most EU countries already had fairly solid privacy regulations, some more, some less, but certainly more than the US (generalization, but that's the trend). If you were a company from a different jurisdiction, you could mostly skirt those regulations (up to a point) because they weren't enforced in most cases. Not so much if the regulation is from your home country. With GDPR, actual EU startups now play by the same rules as non-EU companies who do business in the EU. If a US startup wants to be international, they'll have to compete with EU startups on a more level playing field now.
  - gkya 8y ago
    > The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. I can easily say that if I had to choose between a US service and an EU one, from now on the answer is almost always the EU one.
  - heartbreak 8y ago
    > all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations What gives EU the right to legislate in those jurisdictions? What non-privacy laws will EU enact in non-EU countries? > If a US startup wants to be international Well I have no intention of being international now, but I still have to play by EU's rules on the possibility that I might ever want to do business there.
- tlogan 8y ago
  I actually think it is exactly the opposite: the culture like this was killing the innovation. That is reason biggest companies are ads companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. And that is the reason companies like Oracle and other will still make big $$ - why? Because you cannot "break things and sell ads" and do "delete=1" when you are developing RDMBS.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    I find this pretty rich. Breaking things and selling broken stuff to clients, and then turning around and selling them expensive consulting services is pretty much the biz-model of Oracle. And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]" So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)
- gkya 8y ago
  This culture has been riding a wave of innovation, a wave driven by big chip companies (e.g. Intel, NVidia, Arm), big SaaS companies (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Google), big content / ads companies (e.g. Facebook, Google), big hardware companies (e.g. Apple, Samsung, recently Google and Microsoft) and big software companies (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google). From that big farm of company-flowers which live for only a couple days, founded on the most fragile of practices, only a handful actually produce some service that has any interaction with the general public, and these businesses' most innovative thing was to app-ify a thing that we used to do day to day (which I do not look down upon, but it's no "innovation"). Examples are Uber (however controversial), AirBnB, Etsy, etc., if we exclude those who feed themselves exclusively on users' private data (Facebook, partially Google, Twitter, etc., but these are not businesses whose customers are the general public, their customers are the ad publishers).
- krageon 8y ago
  This kind of US-centric "only we know how to do startups" is tiring. And wrong, as there are in fact hubs here full of startups - you just don't generally hear about them online because it really is incredibly focused on everything American. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but it is important to keep that in mind before you form opinions that are frankly a little distant from reality.

by gkya 8y ago

auganov 8y ago

This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades. You can't point me to one other industry which enjoyed as much success. Of course, Europe couldn't care less - they never had a real startup industry in the first place.

lou1306 8y ago
> This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades. So what? Communism turned feudal Russia into a world superpower in less than 2 decades. Do the ends justify the means?
- auganov 8y ago
  Not making a moral argument. @gkya's comment paints a picture where entrepreneurs unhappy with GDPR are perhaps just a small contingent of incompetent amateurs who shouldn't be doing business in the first place. While I, in agreement with OC/OP, see it as a threat to the entire industry.
  - gkya 8y ago
    Nearly, what I think is that, those unhappy with GDPR are either malevolent actors or incompetent people. And I think the bar to entry to the industry should be elevated (while bar to entry to learning ones way to that bar and to hacking should always be as low as possible; but you can't hack together and end user product, period). BTW I'm not in the US not in a country where GDPR is effective. But I CRAVE that my country implement the same measures or better. Unfortunately that's unlikely. Finally, it's a threat to the bad part of the industry. And then there are those who exaggerate the situation while they are not really affected by the regulation. But the hysteria will diminish and hopefully most of the bad actors wil either change their business or just go out of the industry, searching for other places to exploit (which hopefully they will not find).
baby 8y ago
driving innovation while having the biggest number of homeless people in the streets and no health care.
- tripzilch 8y ago
  the land of the 98% free!
- SuperNinKenDo 8y ago
  Not even close[0] There is healthcare in America[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... [1] Doesn't actually need a source
  - shados 8y ago
    Holy shit. As a Canadian who moved to the US, that was quite surprising. Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem. I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...
    - SuperNinKenDo 8y ago
      Yeah I'm not sure. The presence of homeless people seems to be far more a function of how aggressive the government is at removing them than anything else. Melbourne is absolutely packed with homeless, but Sydney far less so, and I have a feeling it's not because of Sydney's cheap rent[0] or a lack of broken homes in the city. I suspect such a business oriented, conservative city is just more tough on its homeless. [0] Sydney rents are insanely steep
  - gkya 8y ago
    I don't think the commenter meant healthcare as in hospitals and medicine being available; AFAIK the US has nothing like what most other countries has where it is facilitated for most or all citizens to access health care at minimum or no costs.
cerebellum42 8y ago
The other side of this is that the GDPR puts all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations to speak of in front of a choice to either stop doing business with a huge market or actually stop ignoring privacy concerns. The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. Most EU countries already had fairly solid privacy regulations, some more, some less, but certainly more than the US (generalization, but that's the trend). If you were a company from a different jurisdiction, you could mostly skirt those regulations (up to a point) because they weren't enforced in most cases. Not so much if the regulation is from your home country. With GDPR, actual EU startups now play by the same rules as non-EU companies who do business in the EU. If a US startup wants to be international, they'll have to compete with EU startups on a more level playing field now.
- gkya 8y ago
  > The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. I can easily say that if I had to choose between a US service and an EU one, from now on the answer is almost always the EU one.
- heartbreak 8y ago
  > all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations What gives EU the right to legislate in those jurisdictions? What non-privacy laws will EU enact in non-EU countries? > If a US startup wants to be international Well I have no intention of being international now, but I still have to play by EU's rules on the possibility that I might ever want to do business there.
tlogan 8y ago
I actually think it is exactly the opposite: the culture like this was killing the innovation. That is reason biggest companies are ads companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. And that is the reason companies like Oracle and other will still make big $$ - why? Because you cannot "break things and sell ads" and do "delete=1" when you are developing RDMBS.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I find this pretty rich. Breaking things and selling broken stuff to clients, and then turning around and selling them expensive consulting services is pretty much the biz-model of Oracle. And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]" So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)
gkya 8y ago
This culture has been riding a wave of innovation, a wave driven by big chip companies (e.g. Intel, NVidia, Arm), big SaaS companies (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Google), big content / ads companies (e.g. Facebook, Google), big hardware companies (e.g. Apple, Samsung, recently Google and Microsoft) and big software companies (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google). From that big farm of company-flowers which live for only a couple days, founded on the most fragile of practices, only a handful actually produce some service that has any interaction with the general public, and these businesses' most innovative thing was to app-ify a thing that we used to do day to day (which I do not look down upon, but it's no "innovation"). Examples are Uber (however controversial), AirBnB, Etsy, etc., if we exclude those who feed themselves exclusively on users' private data (Facebook, partially Google, Twitter, etc., but these are not businesses whose customers are the general public, their customers are the ad publishers).
krageon 8y ago
This kind of US-centric "only we know how to do startups" is tiring. And wrong, as there are in fact hubs here full of startups - you just don't generally hear about them online because it really is incredibly focused on everything American. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but it is important to keep that in mind before you form opinions that are frankly a little distant from reality.