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Ugh. Maybe I'm in a different world by now, but I dislike such statements on multiple levels. > This typically comes with assertions such as "data is the new o

by tetha 7y ago

Ugh. Maybe I'm in a different world by now, but I dislike such statements on multiple levels. > This typically comes with assertions such as "data is the new oil" and "once we have our dataset and models the Big Tech shops will have no choice but to acquire us". Maybe it's me, but I dislike the attitude to work to be acquired. Interestingly, this is a rift I see quite a bit if I interview more development oriented guys, or more infrastructure oriented guys. Tell me I'm wrong, but development oriented guys tend to be more fast paced and care less about long-term impacts. Infra inclined guys tend to be slower paced, but longer-term oriented. Build something to last and generate value for a long time. > 2. Is it reasonable to be highly skeptical of startups that make these claims, seeing it as a sign they have no real vision for their product? From my B2B experience over the last few years, and working towards a stable business relationship with large European enterprises, yes. My current workplace is moving into the position of becoming a cutting edge provider in our place of the world. This is a point where machine learning and AI becomes interesting. However, we didn't get here by fancy models and AI. We got here by providing good customer support, rock-solid SaaS operation, delivering the right features, strong professional services, and none of those features were AI. It's been good, reliable grunt work. Different forms of AI are currently becoming relevant to our customers, because we have customers that handle 5k tickets per day with our systems and they have 3-4 people just classifying tickets non-stop. We have customers with 30k - 40k articles in their knowledge base, partially redundant, partially conflicting. This is why we entered a relationship with a university researching natural language processing among other - and they will provide us with a big selling point in the future. And they are profiting from this relationship as well, because they are getting large, real world data sets they couldn't access otherwise. Even with a good amount of pre-processing by the different product teams. But as I maintain, nothing of that form has brought us where we are.

FpUser 7y ago
I am really surprised seeing posts like yours downvoted
JohnFen 7y ago
> I dislike the attitude to work to be acquired. This is my preferred method of doing business. I start a company with the intention of selling it to someone else in the end. I do this because it fits my personality the best -- once I have solved a technical problem, I lose interest in it and want to move on to the next thing. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to do business with this sort of goal, and your comment here puts the finger on the difference: > Build something to last and generate value for a long time. This is an essential part of what I need to do in order to sell. It's not time to sell my company until the company is already profitable and set to work over the long term. That's where the real value proposition is for buyers -- I'm not selling a technology or piece of software, I'm selling an established business. In my opinion, people who start businesses with the intent to dump them at the soonest opportunity are really just doing the same thing as people who make money flipping stocks. There's nothing wrong with that (it's just not for me), but it's a completely different sort of thing. It's money-spinning without the intention to build anything of lasting value.

by tetha 7y ago

FpUser 7y ago

I am really surprised seeing posts like yours downvoted

JohnFen 7y ago

> I dislike the attitude to work to be acquired. This is my preferred method of doing business. I start a company with the intention of selling it to someone else in the end. I do this because it fits my personality the best -- once I have solved a technical problem, I lose interest in it and want to move on to the next thing. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to do business with this sort of goal, and your comment here puts the finger on the difference: > Build something to last and generate value for a long time. This is an essential part of what I need to do in order to sell. It's not time to sell my company until the company is already profitable and set to work over the long term. That's where the real value proposition is for buyers -- I'm not selling a technology or piece of software, I'm selling an established business. In my opinion, people who start businesses with the intent to dump them at the soonest opportunity are really just doing the same thing as people who make money flipping stocks. There's nothing wrong with that (it's just not for me), but it's a completely different sort of thing. It's money-spinning without the intention to build anything of lasting value.