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Honestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. R
by CM30 8y ago
Honestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. Reddit, Medium, Twitter... all of them probably could have been profitable businesses if their founders ran them out of a normal office, with normal staff salaries (not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), with less staff and with less money spent on office perks and what not.
Does every business need to be some huge deal with thousands of staff and huge offices and tons of perks and a staff cafe now?
- cookiecaper 8y agoThe problem is not the salaries or the perks that drives the unprofitability, it's simply the investment model. If you're backed by venture capital, you're goal is to get to an exit 500x larger than the investment ($2M round; VCs don't invest unless they think they may make $1B+). That requires people to focus on growth and world-eating more than any respectable-in-the-moment profitability numbers.
- falcon620 8y agoGenerall that's the case, but not for reddit though, right?
- duderific 8y agoWell kind of...if you're in the Bay Area, you need to be able to compete for engineers with the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. No perks == no employees. Why should I go work at your crappy startup when I could live the life of luxury at one of the FANGS.
- falcon620 8y agoSurprise: You don't need to be in the Bay Area to build/run world class companies/products. Maybe sometimes to build, but definitely not to run.
- 6cd6beb 8y agoI think a lot of people would be very interested in a job posting with a tagline like: "We don't have ping pong or topo chico; we have eight hour workdays". If I saw that, saw a clear description of the thing they're building and reasoned that it provides value to someone, I'd be over the moon.
- falcon620 8y agoI think you'd like working in Scandinavia.