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This editorial makes sense: once a company takes outside investment that demands outsized returns not in 10 years, but tomorrow, founders and employees will fee
by smag 8y ago
This editorial makes sense: once a company takes outside investment that demands outsized returns not in 10 years, but tomorrow, founders and employees will feel pressure to take larger risks and act in ways that might not be moral or ethical. VC-backing is definitely a factor in fraud, anti-competitive tactics, and unethical behavior. But what's the alternative to VC-backing? Doesn't seem possible for everything to be bootstrapped.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoIt is. Happens all the time. What are you really after?
- kikoreis 8y agoAre you really arguing that everything can be bootstrapped without up front investment? I know many things can, but equally many cannot in non geological time.
- mcphage 8y ago> many cannot in non geological time Are the things that can't be bootstrapped actually worth doing?
- JohnFen 8y agoYes, for many. There are many things that are worthwhile but can't be done without a substantial amount of money up front. Most software doesn't fall into this category, but a lot of hardware and services do.
- throwaway-571 8y agoTeranos could have been worth it if it hadn’t been a scam. If you can lower the cost of insulin that would be boon to humanity, but good luck bootstrapping that. Better glucose monitor. Lots of medical thing are worth it from an ethical point of view but not bootstrap-able.
- madhadron 8y agoThere are things that can't be bootstrapped. They tend to involve the upfront purchase of millions of dollars of scientific equipment or a decade of R&D. Things like drug candidates and commercial airplanes. That's where venture capital originally developed. I am unaware of and have not been able to think of a software business that requires comparable investment for technical reasons. When you see a software company that must be backed by venture capital, it's to fund anticompetitive practices.
- Qwertystop 8y ago_Maybe_ if your software business idea had at its core some fundamentally hard problem and you needed expensive hardware to be able to run your service fast enough to support all your customers... but even then you could probably get by on cloud providers and being a bit slow, if what you did was useful enough to be worth waiting for. Then just upgrade as you get more customers paying more money.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoNo. Not everything but hundreds a day at least. work hard. Save up. Identify a problem. Solve it. Nice and neat. Sell the solution. Profit. Spend some on marketing and sales. Repeat.
- vincent-toups 8y agoHow about we all just chill? We don't all need to be tech billionaires. Like: just don't start a startup.
- JohnFen 8y agoOr do a startup, but not with the intention of it making you a billionaire.
- throwaway-571 8y agoWell maybe not everything should be funded, and maybe we could put moral above money? It’s not because doing immoral things is legal that it should be done, or that it will stay legal forever. Also, there are ethical things that are illegal to do too.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoNot everything can be bootstrapped, but there are different types of investments. The problem is that VC-backed companies can outspend and thus outcompete companies on a saner but slower investment schedule.