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>> It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the marketplace And who decides what is valued by the marketplace? It's: - Politicians throu
by cryptica 7y ago
>> It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the marketplace
And who decides what is valued by the marketplace?
It's:
- Politicians through regulation.
- The Federal Reserve Bank by continuously creating new money out of thin air.
- Banks by deciding who can get the newly printed Fed money through loans and who can't (typically based on the value of assets which individuals already have; the result is that rich people get most of the new money through almost 0% interest loans).
- Corporate monopolies by locking out competitors (through lobbying government for beneficial regulations or making it prohibitively expensive for other companies to compete due to price gouging, international tax arbitrage, allowing losses in some sectors to selectively wipe out competitors in other sectors, incentivizing journalists to promote the corporate agenda, etc...)
As a small startup, you can be as efficient as you like. If some corporation doesn't want you to succeed, they can easily drain your coffers and crush you without drawing any attention to themselves. It's not about productivity or cleverness; that has very little value these days. Economic value these days lies in one's ability to control the social narrative and the money supply; it doesn't matter what the reality is.
If you have unlimited money, you can literally pay people to sit on their asses and pick their noses all day; you can even convince them that this is helping the company and therefore the whole economy... The company keeps getting more money year after year so somehow all this nose-picking must be paying off right?
The massive hose of Federal Reserve cash plugged straight into the back of the company is just a minor detail.
And the farmers who feed everyone are fools for accepting this electronic play money in exchange for their useful work.
- jmastrangelo 7y agoAll of the mechanics available to the Fed and Politicians are large imprecise tools. Regular people still have unmet needs and successful businesses are still started all the time to meet those needs.
- chrisco255 7y agoRegulation is a reaction to demand, it's not what creates demand. We can debate about the pros and cons of regulation, but that is quite a tangent. Certainly some businesses are prohibited by the existence of stringent regulations. Certainly regulations make it more expensive to start a business in certain industries. But they do not determine what the market wants. The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services. That demand is there, all the time. Right now there is latent demand in the marketplace to extend the human lifespan to 1000 years if possible. There's demand to travel at the speed of light or faster. Whether or not these things are even possible is completely independent of the demand for them. It's also quite absurd that on the tail end of a decade of a start up boom in the tech industry that you would assert that all these factors make it impossible to succeed today. We are on Hacker News, a site powered by YCombinator, an incubator and investor that has helped make it possible for hundreds of companies to succeed that you claim is impossible. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. None of these companies existed 15 years ago.
- cryptica 7y agoY Combinator is completely out of reach for most people. There are limited slots and tens of thousands of applicants. It makes the whole selection process essentially pseudo-random. Also, Y Combinator is not popular because it is successful, it is successful because it is popular. It's no coincidence that Y Combinator operates the most popular technology news link aggregator in the world which all the big corporate tech executives read. This significantly affects the odds of success for startups which join Y Combinator. They choose who wins and it doesn't matter who they choose. If you are selected into YC, it's like winning the lottery. They should do an experiment; filter out all the obvious scam applications then for all remaining applications (tens of thousands of them probably) run a random number generator to select startups based on keywords that YC likes. I bet the success rate for that batch wouldn't be very different from previous batches.
- jacquesm 7y agoYC was successful before it was popular.
- titzer 7y ago> Regulation is a reaction to demand, it's not what creates demand. A regulation that mandates, e.g. catalytic converters, creates demand for them. Requiring car insurance, same. Examples abound. > The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services. The Fed(eral reserve) sets monetary policy. It's supply side. By setting interest rates low, it increases demand for credit.
- Uhhrrr 7y agoHave you ever bought something?
- WalterBright 7y ago> And who decides what is valued by the marketplace? The people you'd be selling to.