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Startup Koolaid - It's a beverage, it's a lifestyle
- massarog 15y agoSite is down for me.
- williamldennis 15y agoup for me
- alnayyir 15y agoup for me
- coderdude 15y agoPretty funny. Does sort of show how laughable the startup scene is. Especially the tech startup scene. It's interesting to stand back and see how "startups" is an industry in and of itself. Almost like some kind of meta-industry. Keep selling us dreams and gold pans! :)
- BrainScraps 15y agoThis is loving and potent satire. Well played, folks!
- borism 15y agoit's missing some important items like Paul Graham's 101 Start-up Commandments and something YC-themed I couldn't come up with yet.
- braveheart2233 15y agogenius!
- gavanwoolery 15y agoJokes are just witty truths. The startup scene is increasingly becoming a joke. I mean no disrespect to anyone who works in the scene - not to employees, not to founders, and not even to many investors. I used to be part of it myself. But what the hell is going on? People are trying to find out how many ways they can push around bits of information. They get an investment, iterate like crazy, and strive to get acquired, only to have their product completely destroyed by their new parent company. Out of all the startups EVER created, I have only used a few products with more than passing interest: Facebook, Google, Youtube, Stack Overflow, and Yelp. And I consider myself to be pretty geeky. Having at least a crude understanding of economic concepts like supply and demand, the startup economy boggles my mind. How is it that so much money is getting circulated around hundreds of thousands of startups when only a handful of them survive for more than 3 years? (And yes, I often count acquisitions as "certain death.") Consumer goods have immediate and often necessary value. Houses last a long time, and carry obvious value. But tech companies can fizzle into nothingness in seconds. These days, value is measured in the size of your user base, which is kind of like monetizing a cat based on how many people pet it. Startups are getting so cheap to produce, I feel like we might as well be trading ideas. All I can say is thank god for the sham. It is keeping me employed. :) END INCOHERENT MIDNIGHT RANT
- emmett 15y agoIt's important to keep in mind that the total amount of money going into early stage startups is still a rounding error on larger economic investment. Numbers that feel personally large, like "$40 million" are actually very small in economic terms.
- gavanwoolery 15y agoYep that is true :) But even micro-economies should function (more or less) similarly to their macro counterparts.
- epo 15y agoMost monetary amounts are small when compared to the economy as a whole. Got any more insights for us? "The sky is only blue when you compare to grass" perhaps?
- ljf 15y ago<pedant alert> The thing that always niggles me about the 'drinking the company/start-up Koolaid' is it's reference to the Jonestown massacre. It was actually Flavor-Aid that was used to mask the Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan, and kill 907 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor_Aid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor_Aid </pedant>
- veyron 15y agoI thought it was a reference to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (for some reason, it was deemed a good idea to have 9th grade students read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
- ljf 15y agoI'd always though it was that too - I'd presumed was a roughly positive expression, eg once you've drunk the company Kool-Aid, you get to see the bigger picture and understand more. A visiting American put me right, before I'd had chance to use it incorrectly! (Amazing book btw, love it)