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Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll b
by AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO?
Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off.
Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.
- mrkurt 3y agoThe simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power. I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.
- hgsgm 3y agoAre you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for your existing customers? Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience? Or do you lock in customers?
- mrkurt 3y agoWe couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to. You can buy 'em from a million different places. It's pretty easy to move off, though. `fly launch` generates a Dockerfile you can run pretty much anywhere.
- xNeil 3y agoYeah no I have to agree with you on this one. Every company is going to raise prices at one point or another - it might be inflation, it might be profit-chasing, padding for an IPO - whatever. Just because a startup might raise prices in the future shouldn't stop you from using their products - with a caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator. I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider just in case?
- danenania 3y agoI can’t speak to other features, but if you just want to run docker containers in the cloud, fly is about as close to zero lock-in as it gets.
- Aeolun 3y ago> I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money Only if your condition is that you want to do it in the next 3 years. Given 15, I imagine quite a lot is possible.
- mrkurt 3y agoI am skeptical that Hetzner or OVH or similar could get off the ground starting in 2023. There are a couple of things working against a boostrapped public cloud: First, you gotta buy expensive kit. And then hope you can make your money back over the next 18 months. Funding this is hard. You could try to borrow money, but that (a) increases your underlying cost and (b) dictates how you sell. You can't borrow money against developer usage / traction because banks don't know how to value that. So you have to do top down sales and land some big, committed customers before you can use debt. The sales model constrains the product. There is no big, committed customer on the planet that will buy global infrastructure from a company who hasn't built it out yet. So you won't be building a global cloud, you'll end up in one region. And, no big committed customer is going to buy something novel. They do not care that "fly launch" makes it easy for a dev to launch a new project. They care that they got the best possible pricing when they were shopping for their hardware. They might care that they can run k8s on it. This is all fine, though. I'm not opposed to it. But I think it leaves you with something that's not as good as AWS, even though it's cheaper.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoSure. And in 15 years you'll have something that might have been relevant 15 years ago.
- Aeolun 3y agoThe world is full of companies like that. Often making boatloads of money with their 15 year outdated practices and tech.
- madeofpalk 3y agoExactly what went through my head when reading > There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.
- EGreg 3y ago[flagged]
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt just all seems irrelevant to fly.io. I can host stuff on there for money, which is all I want from a service provider. Electricity and storage and network and compute and infrastructure engineers cost money, and I'm happy to give them money. How does web3 get these things paid for?
- EGreg 3y agoIt’s not irrelevant to the parent and grandparent comment, which (having experienced the recent buyouts at Reddit and others) are rightly wary of a similar outcome, and regard the mere fact of being funded by VCs as a ticking time bomb. So what is the alternative? Don’t build your app on someone else’s platform. Whether it’s Twitter and Periscope, or Apple vs mamy developers (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-apple-uses-its-app-store-copy-best-ideas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...) … build on a permissionless platform that isn’t owned by any gatekeepers. Like the Web. Or Ethereum. Or Polygon. Utility tokens and micropayments via trustlines are exactly done for that purpose.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI'm only talking about the parent comment in my reply. But okay, I'll bite. How is fly.io not the Web?
- tptacek 3y agoWouldn't that be a really short and boring blog post?
- civilitty 3y agoI assume their writers can expand it beyond “We’re going to fuck you over, but thanks for all the fish!” Make it sound all smart and snarky and stuff.
- gotmedium 3y agoIf that is the case, then you shouldn't be using Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Git, etc etc. Companies raise money now to generate cash flows in the future from a wildly risky innovation. Assuming the thesis is correct, the company will then to pay it back to investors (VCs and their investors including Endowment Funds), but also employee and taxes. As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let government spend in things like education, infrastructure, social security. It's either this or socialism. "Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others"
- donmcronald 3y agoHow does Git fit with the rest of those?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ben-schaaf 3y ago> As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let government spend in things like education, infrastructure, social security. As companies grow so does their ability to dodge taxes. That's why they're headquartered in Ireland, Bermuda or whatever the latest low corporate tax state is. Proportionally they're likely paying less than a corner store. I certainly pay more in income tax.
- malta_kano 3y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 3y agoI don't understand why someone comes to a startup incubator and VC forum when they hate venture funded startups. You know what YC does, right? There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise? Why? It's just baffling behavior.
- fnimick 3y agoIt may be a VC forum, but it functions as a broad technical forum. How many posts here are explicitly about startup economics? It's important to remind people in the broader technical community that financial success should not the only goal, nor should it be required to maximize profit at the expense of customers.
- renewiltord 3y agoFair enough. It's not you, it's me. I'll just not interact with these comments in future. I have a mechanism to fix this.
- Electricniko 3y agoNot OP, but I think the answer is that a lot of people who quit Reddit a couple weeks ago have spread out to other news/discussion forums to find something to replace it. They're still in the exploration phase trying to find communities that resemble subreddits they used. The content on this forum sort of resembles a few tech related subreddits, even if the discussions and intent are quite different.
- renewiltord 3y agoI suppose the community makes the purpose of the community. And this sort of thing makes me worse, so I should seek something else, or modify my interaction with this community. It's an open forum and presumably those running it prefer this outcome. Fair enough.
- Solvency 3y agoThis is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simply how business is done. Every single person looking to build a company for the purposes of becoming rich should adhere religiously to this playbook. It's a cold, hard, transactional fact of life. Whether or not the product is good and fair and honest is largely an independent variable to this basic playbook process.
- esteth 3y agoSometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you want to do. If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.
- akiselev 3y agoThat’s what's so great about five year projections! Somehow it’s always worth it until reality comes knocking after the money’s been raised. Then it’s a mad scramble for ROI that debases everything that built the business.
- Solvency 3y agoThere is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D. It's trivial to imagine how a responsible incremental funding approach could create a better, more transparent, more estimable, more reportable, more mappable, more rigorously trackable innovation process. Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION. You have been led to believe this is the only way to go about building a software business like this. It's all a major silkscreen for the colder simpler goal of generating a lot of eventual wealth for a specific cast of people. Again, no shame or emotion here. It's just how business is done in this world.
- Zetice 3y agoHonest question: why are you on a site whose community is literally created and run by a startup accelerator? It's a given you realize how antagonistic you're being here, so I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoCurious people are allowed some latitude when historical performance predicts future outcomes [1]. This is "not the first rodeo" as it were. Agree being antagonistic is not welcome, but it should not be unwelcome to ask hard questions about how something won't end up the same. I like the Fly.io folks! But asking questions should never be off the table; how else would you be curious? [1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ (it is unfortunate that something with so much value and enjoyment like HN is a product of an investment firm, but a component of life is compromise; enjoy it like you would a public good while it lasts)
- Zetice 3y ago> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. This is not what curiosity looks like, is my point.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI imagine some folks have their curiosity burn out at a certain point. Your point is taken.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y agoWhere better to talk about the downsides of VC funding? I don’t think anyone wants HN to become an echo chamber that believes VC funding is the solution to all problems.
- munificent 3y ago> why are you on a site whose community is literally created and run by a startup accelerator? Why do missionaries go where no one believes their religion already? The idea that you must already be a believer in some community to participate in the community makes little sense and certainly isn't a good way to make progress. > I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this? Would you also characterize your own reply as mere attention seeking?
- ren_engineer 3y ago>My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding you're basically going to be prevented from using anything that isn't an established enterprise(which are also beholden to shareholders) or consumer apps. You can't bootstrap anything that requires significant R&D or infrastructure unless the founder is already rich This post seems to be referencing the Reddit API situation. The solution is to not make your company reliant on a single API , pretty sure with Fly you can deploy Docker containers so you could always switch easily if they tried to price gouge. If something is a critical component of your business you should always plan to be able to switch providers in a hurry for any number of reasons
- berkle4455 3y agoI don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8 vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the same.
- flagged24 3y agoIt's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of €30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess an easy deploy story ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bombela 3y agoYou pay for not having to manage anything yourself or hire somebody dedicated to do so. How much is that worth?
- dathinab 3y agoDeveloper time is pretty costy and if you can save a lot of dev time a noticeable higher running cost can be well worth it for some companies (like smaller companies, startups which have still a fluent changing business model etc.). Through also it's not a fair compression because for the kind of services where being close to the edge and redundant over many places matters Hetzner isn't even an option. AWS maybe, but AWS is also pain in my experience.
- flagged24 3y agoThat's fair. Depending on budget, requirements and capabilities of the team something like fly.io can become a valid option.
- danenania 3y agoIs fly vs Hetzner really apples to apples though? A more apt comparison would be to AWS, GCP, and Azure no?
- kunalgupta 3y agoSo like which products do you use, then?
- cj 3y agoA lot of companies are bootstrapped or "seed-strapped". My company raised a $1.2m seed after doing a startup accelerator in 2015, used it to get to profitability, and we've been growing 40% YoY for a very long time without any additional outside capital. It's also a huge selling point to prospective employees while interviewing candidates: "Unlike many other startups, we haven't raised lots of money, we're profitable, we've never done lay offs. That's all possible because we have product market fit and we have a sustainable business model. Our customers (rather than VCs) fund our growth." Personally, I really like the "seed strapped" model... raise 1-2 million in order to find PMF and begin an early sales/marketing function with the goal of reaching profitability before the $1-2 million is burned through. It also creates a short window to fail fast... lots of companies raised way too much money and will end up failing very slowly. "Failing very slowly" is what should be avoided. Raising huge amounts of VC is a signal the company couldn't sustain their growth with their current revenue and operating model. It's also a signal that the company is likely using inorganic / unscalable tactics to grow, which might work now but won't work forever. That means the company will likely pivot their model at some point (from an employee perspective, that means higher risk of lay offs, and from a customer perspective, that means higher risk of price hikes in the future, etc)
- coder9874 3y agoThis is an entirely valid model, and many startups would be better served by following it. Still, the whole point of (larger) VC funding rounds is facilitate rapid growth, far more than 40% year over year. There's no contradiction between embracing bootstrapping/seedstrapping where it works, and VC funding for the cases with hyper-growth potential.
- rco8786 3y ago> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. What about posting on a forum owned and operated by a venture firm? Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed tech firms is endless. I don't even disagree with the general sentiment...but your resolution seems particularly short-sighted.
- tjoff 3y ago> Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed tech firms is endless. Not a convincing list of companies there...
- rco8786 3y agoI chose those because they are ubiquitous and downright hard to avoid. What do you want to bet OP made that post on a Chrome browser? Or an Android/iPhone/Macbook? Is there even a way to purchase a computer of any sort that doesn't involve supporting a venture backed company? The list of venture backed companies is so long, it would be exhaustive if not impossible to avoid using them without going off grid. How many venture backed companies do you think are involved just in me pressing the "reply" button to send this post?
- tjoff 3y agoSure, but that just reinforces the idea to not support them in the beginning?
- autonomousErwin 3y agoI think It's actually quite a beneficial pattern for the likes of the consumer and the founders. Say Fly will eventually get acquired or IPO, their founders will justify it that they could use that money to work on Fly's mission statement or if they've had their fill of servers go on to build further startups in Fusion, AI, or Space Technologies or even give to charity (take your pick). When they do get acquired/IPO the natural bureaucracy of large organisations and shift in incentives will set in (we've been here before with Heroku/Salesforce and SendGrid/Twilio...) and they'll become slow, more risk-averse, and ultimately less innovative catering for enterprise and other large businesses (where the easy corporate money is at) instead of scrappy startups and curious hackers. This is where Fly 2.0 comes in 5 years down the line reaching No. 1 on Hacker New, where utilising the latest technology they'll create a completely new and innovative solution that will solve the current problem even better than now and they'll start by catering for startups and hackers until they themselves get acquired/IPO. This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing - founders get a chance to cash out, consumers get cycles of new innovation.
- cloogshicer 3y agoExcept when you get something like YouTube or the American telcos that have a monopoly/oligopoly and suck all potential for competition out of the space.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago[flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoWhile I tend to agree with your overall thesis, and I get particularly baffled when some SaaS company, whose nearly sole expense is payroll, feels the need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, fly.io is a cloud infrastructure company. They literally run physical servers all over the world (at least, that's my understanding from their website). I've got to imagine then that this business has huge capital costs, and it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive business without outside capital. I don't disagree with your main point. Everyone has seen "enshittification" eventually take over all tech startups as they switch the focus from satisfying users to satisfying investors. But I just don't see how you build a business that requires running servers all over the world without a lot of capital.
- gtirloni 3y ago> it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive business without outside capital. That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? You don't spend what you don't need _right now_. But Fly.io makes a good point about reaching critical mass to discuss better prices from their vendors. I can totally understand that.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that's the promise for cloud computing customers. Fly.io is a cloud computing provider, and those are all hugely capital intensive businesses.
- colechristensen 3y ago>selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term? I mean... raising prices ≠ "selling out any pretense..." You're upset that a growing business lowers prices to grow faster? Ok, but maybe relax a little. You're upset that advertising-based businesses eventually shut down the ad-free clients that use the API? Ok, but maybe relax a little. A business grows with low prices and loses some customers not willing to pay when they put up prices that reflect longer term sustainability. That happens, why does it have to be a moral outrage? Yeah, if you're using a VC-backed startup expect the cheap services to get pulled back on when they hit IPO time.
- andy_ppp 3y agoI’m not against this, by that point there will be another hosting provider with even cooler features for small companies to make their next startup in. Fly.io are doing great I think and that they might one day charge more I’m not that upset by it at all. If fly.io can make money at a higher price that means they are adding more value. I hasten to add you appear to be hanging out on a forum focused on VC funded startups.
- jwr 3y agoThis. In the long term, in a venture funded business, there is no outcome that is good for users. "Growth" is the focus now, until the business dies (by acquisition, IPO or bankrupcy, all of which are bad for users).
- ajsharp 3y agoComplaining about companies raising venture capital on hacker news! What!? No way!? This is going to sound wild, but believe it or not it takes quite a bit of capital to reserve capacity in data centers ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your core value prop of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This used to just be called making a capital investment (because it takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to whine about venture capital. You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7 coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit takes...capital. Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not from venture capital firms? Honestly, do you even know what you're bitching about? A theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b. would not exist if fly did not theoretically create a product so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is not a monopoly, it's market dominance; they are very different)? And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably should raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and orders of magnitude easier. Take your aimless cope elsewhere.
- samtho 3y agoFurther, it seems like these highly integrated “app platforms as a service” have been the primary type of dev tool that VCs are drawn too given the complete vendor lock in they provide/demand. It worked for squarespace, wix, Shopify, et al. Vercel has a softer sell on this, and firebase was one of the first to offer a fully managed database in this space. My hot take is that these platforms are relying on an influx of new developers who need a friction free way to build and deploy applications to learn and showcase while selling to companies that don’t have time or budget to create a full dev team and CI/CD environment, creating both sides of supply and demand. Pricing is engineered in a way such that it gets very expensive the moment before companies notice how much cost it incurs but the cost to switch aways is much higher. I agree with the heuristic of avoiding VC-backed products, it fosters incentives that often leave otherwise loyal customers holding the bag for a product who price does not match the service provided. It is for this reason I consider high vendor-lock-in products rather insidious.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago>once you’ve monopolized your particular market? How can you monopolize this market? There is no moat here at all. There are already trillion dollar companies competing here. They are selling a commodity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cphajduk 3y agoI would partially disagree. I think your statements are true, but only for companies that raise investments on the promise of scaling to greater profitability, but ultimately fail to deliver. If the founders delude themselves or are overly optimistic, the only recourse they have to investors is to gouge the customer. Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. Not 'as much as possible'
- tlogan 3y ago> Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. > Not 'as much as possible' Money is like sex - only too much is enough.
- danielrhodes 3y agoI can understand how you might think investors mis-align the business with customers, but this isn't necessarily true. First, businesses aren't in the business of leaving money on the table. That is fine for a non-profit, but ultimately they need to weigh money making with customer satisfaction and growth. It's crazy to think a business should not optimize here. Second, you're conflating venture-funded consumer businesses with B2B businesses. Consumer businesses with venture funding are typically going to fuel growth/momentum by doing things which don't scale. But eventually push comes to shove. B2B business models are usually more transparent about what is a promotion and what is not. Consumer businesses don't always know how the business model is going to play out to even offer that transparency. Third, if your business model is advertising and data is your moat, then when you give away your data via API to promote distribution, yes you run into an issue later on when you need to advertise or you have underinvested somewhere (in Reddit's case it was mobile). For Reddit or Twitter, these mobile apps were profiting off their users/data while taking on none of the costs (infrastructure, moderation, etc.), and limiting their means of monetizing themselves. You don't need an investor to tell you that isn't in your long term interest.
- tedmiston 3y ago> Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term? To be fair, the fate of most of them is actually to fail. Hence this amplified effect of why VCs need such a standout massive return to make the fund model work. That said, while it seems like it to us normal folk, in the grand scheme of VC, $25M is not really "a bunch of money". In 2021, a16z led or co-lead $3.2B [1] in funding rounds. I can't find a publicly available stat for how many rounds that entailed, but napkin math says 100–300. Of course the distribution is not linear, but if we take the 200 investments midpoint, that's a $16M check on average. The additional $70M here follow-on is the real story. It looks like they are not giving it a label, though Crunchbase lists the $25M from a16z a year ago as Series B, so I'm inclined to call this new round the Series C. > My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. IMO tech, startups at least, are not long-minded like this in general. Companies regularly come and go in 6–24 months. Good luck convincing the current and next waves of CTOs of not using venture-backed tech [that saves them tons of time for great prices right now]. And then portcos also often make deals with other portcos... the cycle feeds itslef in more ways than one. It's like trying to change the color of the ocean with one single cup of red dye. At the end of the day, this is just a rounding error. But also, Big Tech will end up acquiring many of the standouts a la Firebase or Heroku. Resisting the model won't upend or stop it. [1]: https://news.crunchbase.com/liquidity/under-the-hood-a-decade-after-software-is-eating-the-world-andreessen-horowitz-has-its-best-exit-year-yet/ https://news.crunchbase.com/liquidity/under-the-hood-a-decad...
- quickthrower2 3y agoThey are a web hosting company, like AWS (etc.), so at least you can shift your stuff to somewhere else if it gets too pricey. The "etc." is basically thousands of other companies.
- scarface_74 3y agoOnly said by someone who hasn’t done large scale migrations. It’s never that easy. It’s always disruptive.
- quickthrower2 3y agoSure, but if you are a startup and your bill went from $10,000/m (say this is comparable to AWS) to $100,000/m because the fly investors said so, you would probably move? Or go bust? Either way it is not good game theoretically for the vendor to do that. And if they did they also wont get the enterprise customers who are considering conservative alternatives.
- coder9874 3y agoGood luck avoiding every single venture-funded company. Can you give an example of such a "monopoly"? Vercel? They have plenty of competitors, all they are doing is charging a premium for convenience. There will always be alternatives to any given tool if you don't like the costs. Seems your problem is with capitalism and not this particular startup.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago[flagged]
- NicoJuicy 3y agoCloudflare is going for market share in the cloud. Pretty safe bet that they'll stay cheap for a long time because of that. Because outside of tech innovation, cost is still a mayor selling point.
- tlogan 3y agoIt is true but that is life. Consider this perspective: Users of Fly.io are essentially getting a loan from venture capitalists. However, just like any loan, it has to be repaid eventually. Thus, it's prudent not to take on an excessively large commitment.
- themagician 3y agoWelcome to capitalism, mate. Without exploitation there is no excess, no abundance. Without exploitation there are no profits.
- amatecha 3y agoYeah, I follow the same view, I've stopped paying attention to companies that raise venture capital or are publicly traded (aka, they don't truly own the direction of their own business). Whatever good is there is _always_ subverted by the persistent need for "growth" and "increasing engagement" and hitting metrics that are pleasing to investors. It'll start out pretty minor, but the trajectory is persistently altered at nearly every single point of decision. The sway is there, no matter what, and sometimes major decisions are driven solely by "it's what our stakeholders want/need", and the thought of the end-user of the software is practically an afterthought or side-effect.
- nologic01 3y agoother things being equal, organic growth via paying customers is the time-honored way of avoiding the pathologies you mention. in this model speculative capital is only required in the very early stages. a company either reaches a symbiotic relation with its clients or not. the burden is primarily on intrinsic aspects of what the startup venture delivers and how much this resonates in its sector. the VC model is basically turbo-charging this process. though it is risk capital and not lending, it creates an implicit, arbitrarily sized liability that need not have much to do with the underlying value proposition. it removes the organic cashlow constraint via a faustian bargain. the "beauty" of it is that you can't have both models in the same economy. the set of ideas that are ripe for exploration at an given era are what they are. if some people pursue them while being on steroids this means there is no room for people to explore them in a less toxic way
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago[flagged]
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoHere is an alternative, unpopular (for the narrative like in the above post) hot take. Nothing is forever. Five years is a long time. People need motivation. Enjoy and make use of things while they last. Nobody owes you anything. But you have options. You can have a business genius build a company that delivers great product forever without grinding employees into the dust, burning up founders and still outmaneuvering competitors. You can have no product or a company going under because founders have stretched them thin, burned out and went broke ruining their lives pursuing a good idea that morphed into a sunken cost. Or you can crazy pricing models justified by the desire to live like a VC LP while shipping a 3rd party API-dependent cute app. But without VC! Or you can have a VC-subsidized business that ships a product at ridiculously low prices, locks you in for some 3-5 years and then goes ballistic and becomes unusable. But it’s been five years of a very good run, FIVE YEARS. And then the next will come to take their place. Reading how five years is a short timeline for a low-cost-high-value product is wild. Now that’s some entitlement.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throw10920 3y agoThis kind of comment is blatantly violating the HN guidelines in both letter and spirit - it's a generic political tangent meant to spark a flamewar that has no informational content or value whatsoever.