5 ms·
Whine whine. I have an idea. Why not make a product to sell to consumers, instead of making shares to sell to the public?
by spolsky 18y ago
Whine whine. I have an idea. Why not make a product to sell to consumers, instead of making shares to sell to the public?
- alecco 18y agoWell said. How about downscaling the size. Sites like Twitter could be done by one person and a bit for subcontracting. Sites like Facebook by a team of 10 to 15. Too much money and too much megabuck sponsored hype. Simple micro startups are still left out even though they are more than viable.
- colinplamondon 18y agoThere seems to be an almost pathological bias against profitability with a lot of startups.
- acgourley 18y agoThat's not really it, if we're going to speak in generalizations it would be more fitting to talk about the investors that favor high risk/high reward growth patterns.
- sown 18y agoSo I heard that some think that is because for a long while the R/D effort was outsourced to other companies, away from larger ones. I dunno if that is the case but in the company I worked for got acquired and did some pretty serious R/D. It could have been profitable but acquisition was obviously the easier way out so the investors took it. I'm sure something like Twitter is useful but only to a large company, perhaps? I dunno.
- vaksel 18y agoI think the whole huge employee numbers are just a way for those big companies to justify to their investors their high valuations. "Oh yeah we have 700 employees, so we are a huge company, so 500 mil in VC funding is really not a lot for a huge company like us"
- bradgessler 18y agoSorry but that statement is crap. I'm sure if Twitter could be done by one person, they could. These companies have a LOT more going on than just banging out code.
- mpc 18y agoA site like Facebook would be impossible with just 10-15 people. Designing, implementing, and managing something on that scale is an insane amount of work. It probably takes a dozen ops/monitoring people just to keep the thing running.
- alecco 18y agoOnly with standard corporate solutions. a Website (httpd etc) + Web Application server (CMS/CMF) + Application Container (J2EE and all that) + RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL...) And multiply that to development, QA, and production environments. Yes, that way you need millions just in licenses and hosting to run even a lol-site and hundreds of employees to keep the beast working.
- wschroter 18y agoNot really the point when discussing the investor market. If companies don't have quick exits, the typical venture investor can't make their fund operate. That said, I do believe building a company that creates value on the basis of selling a profitable product is all that matters.