3 ms·
> if you haven't outlined a clear path from 1-3 people in a metaphorical garage to reaching $1B, it almost never happens, and sometimes for stupid reasons most
by pas 2y ago
> if you haven't outlined a clear path from 1-3 people in a metaphorical garage to reaching $1B, it almost never happens, and sometimes for stupid reasons
most of the business plans are clear. acquire users and/or paying customers, build out the product, raise money and eventually raise prices too.
engineering side is even simpler, keep the lights on, work with product designers to find incremental steps, iterate.
as others have mentioned upthread if a startup finds a great niche (and manages to make it a whole new market for example) they simple cannot fail due to inadequate engineering. (because worst case you fire the whole engineering department and just acqui-hire a random startup and you'll be back to growth in no time.)
of course this take might be too hot, so I'm happy to read some counterarguments (maybe there are even counterexamples?)
- blagie 2y ago> they simple cannot fail due to inadequate engineering. (because worst case you fire the whole engineering department and just acqui-hire a random startup and you'll be back to growth in no time.) > ... > of course this take might be too hot, so I'm happy to read some counterarguments (maybe there are even counterexamples?) Netscape. (Plenty of others too)
- pas 2y agoNetscape's main revenue came from Navigator, right? A browser. Classic commodity. How did they fail due to engineering deficiencies? (Netscape was better than Mosaic, they invented JavaScript, there was plenty of chops there, and initially they had revenue, IPO went great ... at that point it's arguably not a startup anymore.) And even when it failed it was worth 4.2B to AOL. ... if we're talking about browsers, Netscape's reincarnation Mozilla is again in the same tough spot. They have zero business sense, absolutely no plan, nada. At that point it's completely irrelevant how long it takes them to fix bugs or implement Web APIs or make it faster on various platforms. And still, they funded Rust and Servo.