6 ms·

Not what you asked, but stories like this are why competition is critical to the economy. All large human systems, government, academia, business, whatever, co

Not what you asked, but stories like this are why competition is critical to the economy. All large human systems, government, academia, business, whatever, converge to this. Everybody's comfortable, nobody's working too hard, sure, we'll get to it in a couple months...maybe. The paychecks will keep on coming, we can all go home at 5, everything's great. Then, all of a sudden, some small startup "cuts corners", doesn't fill out the paperwork, kind of ignores all this "compliance" a bit, and somehow...out-executes you with 1/10th the staff, at half the price. The immediate reaction is always disbelief, and rationalization. "They don't have feature X". "They aren't PCI-DSS compliant." Yet somehow, the customers are lining up and can't get enough. Someone figured out precisely what mattered and what didn't (what people were willing to pay for), and delivered it. Single-payer healthcare, the DMV, and private equity-created monopolies are what happens when there's no competition. There lies the world of consistently higher prices, "waiting rooms", we can't do that because "it's never been done that way before", etc.

sangnoir 5y ago
> Then, all of a sudden, some small startup "cuts corners", doesn't fill out the paperwork, kind of ignores all this "compliance" a bit, and somehow...out-executes you with 1/10th the staff, at half the price. I'd quibble with your word choice and replace "and somehow..." with "because of this". It's apparent to me that you can work faster and do it cheaper when you're cutting corners, which is where some of the value in startups lie (in addition to the actual innovation). Acquiring companies do a lot of heavy lifting to ensure compliance in all their markets. As a startup, front end devs could push out a feature in half a day; bur that was in (American) English only, with no review of the copy by Legal, and didn't comply with EU accessibility standards on minimum contrast ratio, nor did they check to see of it works with screen readers. Each of these things could cause legal/regulatory/reputation problems for large companies, but all the former-startup engineer sees is bureaucracy - because they are now working at a scale they are not familiar with. A startup may ignore colorblind users, with no consequences, but the DMV should not. For large societal problems, MVPs do not cut it.

sangnoir 5y ago

> Then, all of a sudden, some small startup "cuts corners", doesn't fill out the paperwork, kind of ignores all this "compliance" a bit, and somehow...out-executes you with 1/10th the staff, at half the price. I'd quibble with your word choice and replace "and somehow..." with "because of this". It's apparent to me that you can work faster and do it cheaper when you're cutting corners, which is where some of the value in startups lie (in addition to the actual innovation). Acquiring companies do a lot of heavy lifting to ensure compliance in all their markets. As a startup, front end devs could push out a feature in half a day; bur that was in (American) English only, with no review of the copy by Legal, and didn't comply with EU accessibility standards on minimum contrast ratio, nor did they check to see of it works with screen readers. Each of these things could cause legal/regulatory/reputation problems for large companies, but all the former-startup engineer sees is bureaucracy - because they are now working at a scale they are not familiar with. A startup may ignore colorblind users, with no consequences, but the DMV should not. For large societal problems, MVPs do not cut it.