3 ms·
Ho-ly shit! I a, doing the exact same thing as the author. The similarities are eerie! I run "another web design shop" while at the same time building a web pro
by billpatrianakos 15y ago
Ho-ly shit! I a, doing the exact same thing as the author. The similarities are eerie! I run "another web design shop" while at the same time building a web product on the side. A startup within a startup, the mother of all mom n' pop startup shops just like he says.
I feel for the author. There are plenty of us out here in the sticks (well, I'm just a stone's throw away from Chicago but others are in the sticks) slaving away, reading HN and TechCrunch and wondering, "does yet another me-too social network really need a trillion dollar funding round?" and "it's pretty obvious that Groupon is a bubble so how could anyone have let them get this far?".
In some ways we think the 1% are a bunch of undeserving assholes who are screwing things up for the rest of us. We see Valleywood as a huge bubble and, just like Hollywood, it often looks shallow, vain, and like nothing more than novelty from the outside.
In other ways we envy the 1% and sometimes even idolize them while dreaming of the day we get featured on TechCrunch or when PG personally invites us to become part of YC's next round.
We simultaneously love the big guys and hate them. Startups are more than hard. They're downright impossible! There are those of us who try despite this and I'd say those who go down that road are either delusional, crazy, or really god damn smart (like Einstein multiplied by Edison to the power of Newton smart). The market is already overcrowded by hordes of idiots who think "HTML for Dummies" books contain all the technical knowledge they need to build and run a web startup and more naive idiots who have a decent tech background (like me!), know they'll need far more to execute, but figure they're smart enough to learn what they need as they go.
In the end, really making it is like winning the lottery. You know you won't but you have to try to know for sure. The best we can do is just try to eek out a nice middle class living for ourselves and hope to god our business doesn't sink against the odds. I never came across an article that really hit the nail on the head like this one. Thank you for writing it Matt!
- davidhansen 15y agoIn some ways we think the 1% are a bunch of undeserving assholes who are screwing things up for the rest of us. We see Valleywood as a huge bubble and, just like Hollywood, it often looks shallow, vain, and like nothing more than novelty from the outside. They are, and it is. The bubble will pop, and those of us who managed to build sustainable businesses without the benefit of setting huge piles of other people's money on fire will be very well positioned to take advantage of the carnage. Patience is rarely a virtue in the startup world. But in this case, it is. Keep building.
- billpatrianakos 15y agoI often think that way too but I worry that if the bubble pops it could actually make things harder for those of us who have sustainable businesses. Not everyone can afford to bootstrap and sometimes you have to take a loan. Now, I haven't and I have no plans to but what if one day in the future people like us get to a point where it actually makes sense to have some investors on board (responsibly, of course) but by that time the bubble bursts and we're left with nothing even if we are a good investment? Maybe I'm wrong and it's that envy in me that wants to get to that point.
- timjahn 15y agoI'm a fellow Chicagoland entrepreneur, would love to connect!
- mattreport 15y agoBill, that's great to hear! Hope that article brings your efforts to light! Thanks for reading!