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Everything needing to become a unicorn today is killing a ton of good products and services. It's apparently impossible to just be a successful small business f

• taneq 8y ago
  Indeed. You see it here a lot, someone will be sneering at a business with $10 million annual turnover and 20 staff and calling it a "lifestyle business", as if owning a double-digit percentage of such a business is not an excellent outcome by any sane standards. Venture capital might be the only way to fund a moonshot-style startup but it seems to be the kiss of death for already-established, already-profitable businesses.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Moonshots would be cool if they were actually aiming at the Moon, not just churning out websites only incrementally different from other websites. I do wonder how much this churn contributes to the West not being able to do any actual moonshots. Smartwatches are not "moonshots". They shouldn't be treated as such. They could be a component of one, though, and society would benefit from components being economically stable, instead of imploding after few years. Pebble was arguably the sanest smartwatch design out there - long battery life, power-efficient screens, hackable[0]. Because they suddenly wanted to get too big too fast, the world today does not have any smartwatch of comparable quality and utility. -- [0] - not just in terms of writing watch faces; people did try to use them as medical devices[1], and they even had a protocol for attaching custom hardware that didn't go anywhere, but probably would if the company was still around [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5018102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5018102/