5 ms·

For all you founders and YC aspirants who build companies to get rich as quickly as possible: think of what this man achieved and the lives that have been chang

For all you founders and YC aspirants who build companies to get rich as quickly as possible: think of what this man achieved and the lives that have been changed by creating something built to last. By not extracting maximum labor from employees and maximum cash for yourselves but by recognizing you matter less than you think to your company's success and your employees matter more. I buy Bob's Red Mills flour a few times a year and probably will for the rest of my life. TextPayMe, Loopt, Infogami, Memamp, Simmery- do we even remember what those first YC companies tried to do? Think about making things people will remember in a decade, or even 4.

cj 3y ago
Longevity is one of many benchmarks of success, and definitely not the only.
- advael 3y ago
  Indeed, we can choose any metric we like really, as evidenced by the current reality where most people can't afford a house but we still claim that "the economy" is "doing well"
  - smegger001 3y ago
    Doing well relative to the previous financial period. Well compared to my parents generation or their parents generation not so much. better than my greatgrandparents generation though as the great depression makes now look like utopia. It all a matter of what your scale for comparison is.
    - advael 3y ago
      Again, the answer you get out of the exercise of delineating "financial periods" depends a lot on how you choose to define them. I'd say for example that good candidates for "previous financial periods" could be pre-covid, pre-2008, pre-dotcom, pre-neoliberalism, or pre-ww2. Some political commentators may prefer to use presidential administration changeovers to make their various points. Since you mention it, it's worth noting that economic conditions immediately preceding the great depression have some key similarities to some of the problems we're having now (a lot of investor fuckery, monopolies, and just outright scams, a lot of adults in a condition of economic precarity, rising global geopolitical instability, etc) though obviously there are also differences. There are many quality-of-life metrics we could choose too. For example, if you value going out on the town, the decline of so-called "third places" may be a major drop in quality of life, and if you value watching TV, the proliferation of streaming services could be the best thing that's ever happened
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    People can afford "more house" than ever - if we look at things like square foot of housing per capita, then people in USA currently can afford almost twice as much housing space as 50 years ago in 1970s.
    - advael 3y ago
      Yes, this is another great demonstration of how we can tell any story we want with choice of metric. I'm referring to the binary variable of home ownership, whereas your measure probably either excludes non-homeowners entirely, is only referring to the total amount of extant housing with no reference to who owns it, or counts renters the same as homeowners, painting a very different picture. For example, I would rather live in a country where every adult can afford 1000 sqft than one where just Jeff Bezos can afford 300000000000000000 sqft and no one else can afford any (neither of these are the current world, obviously), but the latter does better on mean square-footage affordance
      - PeterisP 3y ago
        I'd argue is that the key aspect of housing is how much living space do people actually get to use, as that is the thing which impacts their quality of life and lifestyle; the second slightly less important aspect is how much people are paying for that (e.g. share of income left for other things), but after those two things are accounted for, the aspect of rent vs mortgage is more of a technical nuance of how that "barter of work hours for living space" is arranged. Of course, the mean does ignore equality and variance - but while it's hard for me to find good statistics on that (perhaps census data has that analysis?), I'm quite convinced that if we'd look at the metrics of "mean square foot per capita for the x-th income quintile", we would also see that it has significantly increased since 1970s for the lowest income groups as well.
        advael 3y ago
        In practice the so-called "technical nuance" has huge impacts on what spaces can be used for and what guarantees can be made about the permanence of these arrangements. These factors matter considerably more to most people than the marginal value of a few hundred square feet
- yxwvut 3y ago
  I think the broader point is that improving societal utility is rarely the north star of a startup, not that every business needs to last a century.
nimbius 3y ago
In the defense of YC by modern neoliberalist definition bob was a terrible businessman. The company's only worth 50 million, he ran up debts so large it required a partner to bail him out, the company never went public or sold to large agricultural interests to maximize shareholder value, and he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding. he focused on an unprofitable cadre of niche markets. Bob was a great guy though and a sterling example of a leader who really cared about his product and his customers.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Other than running up too much debt and getting bailed out (is that functionally different from getting outside funding?), I don't see any reason why these things are bad business. Even if you're a steely-eyed capitalist, you have to admit that these were wildly successful long-term investments in developing loyal lifelong customer base. The only difference is that the time horizon on those investments are much longer than your typical VC or PE firm cares for.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- diputsmonro 3y ago
  I think you're making the same point, but just to make it more obvious - all of that is more an indictment of modern neoliberal business practices than it is of Bob's Red Mill. Sustainability, efficiency (in terms of doing things right, rather than doing them quickly) and overall most benefit for the most humans is better than the get-rich-quick schemes that most startups have become.
- TheGeminon 3y ago
  Where are you getting that the company is worth $50m? The article says it’s a “$100 million-a-year” business
  - AceJohnny2 3y ago

cj 3y ago

Longevity is one of many benchmarks of success, and definitely not the only.

advael 3y ago
Indeed, we can choose any metric we like really, as evidenced by the current reality where most people can't afford a house but we still claim that "the economy" is "doing well"
- smegger001 3y ago
  Doing well relative to the previous financial period. Well compared to my parents generation or their parents generation not so much. better than my greatgrandparents generation though as the great depression makes now look like utopia. It all a matter of what your scale for comparison is.
  - advael 3y ago
    Again, the answer you get out of the exercise of delineating "financial periods" depends a lot on how you choose to define them. I'd say for example that good candidates for "previous financial periods" could be pre-covid, pre-2008, pre-dotcom, pre-neoliberalism, or pre-ww2. Some political commentators may prefer to use presidential administration changeovers to make their various points. Since you mention it, it's worth noting that economic conditions immediately preceding the great depression have some key similarities to some of the problems we're having now (a lot of investor fuckery, monopolies, and just outright scams, a lot of adults in a condition of economic precarity, rising global geopolitical instability, etc) though obviously there are also differences. There are many quality-of-life metrics we could choose too. For example, if you value going out on the town, the decline of so-called "third places" may be a major drop in quality of life, and if you value watching TV, the proliferation of streaming services could be the best thing that's ever happened
- PeterisP 3y ago
  People can afford "more house" than ever - if we look at things like square foot of housing per capita, then people in USA currently can afford almost twice as much housing space as 50 years ago in 1970s.
  - advael 3y ago
    Yes, this is another great demonstration of how we can tell any story we want with choice of metric. I'm referring to the binary variable of home ownership, whereas your measure probably either excludes non-homeowners entirely, is only referring to the total amount of extant housing with no reference to who owns it, or counts renters the same as homeowners, painting a very different picture. For example, I would rather live in a country where every adult can afford 1000 sqft than one where just Jeff Bezos can afford 300000000000000000 sqft and no one else can afford any (neither of these are the current world, obviously), but the latter does better on mean square-footage affordance
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      I'd argue is that the key aspect of housing is how much living space do people actually get to use, as that is the thing which impacts their quality of life and lifestyle; the second slightly less important aspect is how much people are paying for that (e.g. share of income left for other things), but after those two things are accounted for, the aspect of rent vs mortgage is more of a technical nuance of how that "barter of work hours for living space" is arranged. Of course, the mean does ignore equality and variance - but while it's hard for me to find good statistics on that (perhaps census data has that analysis?), I'm quite convinced that if we'd look at the metrics of "mean square foot per capita for the x-th income quintile", we would also see that it has significantly increased since 1970s for the lowest income groups as well.
      - advael 3y ago
        In practice the so-called "technical nuance" has huge impacts on what spaces can be used for and what guarantees can be made about the permanence of these arrangements. These factors matter considerably more to most people than the marginal value of a few hundred square feet
yxwvut 3y ago
I think the broader point is that improving societal utility is rarely the north star of a startup, not that every business needs to last a century.

nimbius 3y ago

In the defense of YC by modern neoliberalist definition bob was a terrible businessman. The company's only worth 50 million, he ran up debts so large it required a partner to bail him out, the company never went public or sold to large agricultural interests to maximize shareholder value, and he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding. he focused on an unprofitable cadre of niche markets. Bob was a great guy though and a sterling example of a leader who really cared about his product and his customers.

nerdponx 3y ago
Other than running up too much debt and getting bailed out (is that functionally different from getting outside funding?), I don't see any reason why these things are bad business. Even if you're a steely-eyed capitalist, you have to admit that these were wildly successful long-term investments in developing loyal lifelong customer base. The only difference is that the time horizon on those investments are much longer than your typical VC or PE firm cares for.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
diputsmonro 3y ago
I think you're making the same point, but just to make it more obvious - all of that is more an indictment of modern neoliberal business practices than it is of Bob's Red Mill. Sustainability, efficiency (in terms of doing things right, rather than doing them quickly) and overall most benefit for the most humans is better than the get-rich-quick schemes that most startups have become.
TheGeminon 3y ago
Where are you getting that the company is worth $50m? The article says it’s a “$100 million-a-year” business
- AceJohnny2 3y ago