14 ms·
How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
- Haroldteresa 2y ago[dead]
- jmclnx 2y agoIf the proposal has "AI" in it, lots :) But the comic beat me to it, I wish they were trying to be funny, but ... Nice Comic BTW
- retrocryptid 2y agoOne thing I noticed from the Sili Valley startups I've been involved with in the last 20 years: exec management's parents went to school w/ the funds managers. I have this theory that there's institutional money burning a hole in various institution's collective pockets. Those funds' managers are under pressure to invest a percentage in risky, high reward opportunities. So they have money that has to be invested. You would look pretty stupid if you missed out on investing in the next Facebook or Google. So you get some valley VC firms managed by guys who went to MIT, UCB or Stanford in the 80s and made their cash founding 90s era startups. Now these guys' college room-mates have kids in MIT, UCB and Stanford who are about to graduate. So they (the VC's old room mates) channel some dosh into the VC's funds. In return, the VC's fund startups started by their room-mate's kids. For the parent, it's great. They avoid estate taxes and if there's a profit, they only pay capital gains rates. The kids receive their pay in perfectly laundered equity which at the next liquidity event can be reified outside the IRS' jurisdiction, so they wind up paying 12% corporate tax in Panama instead of the on-shored 26% cap gains rate. All that's really required is a greater fool to take the series A shares off your hands when you do a series B. My take on SiliValley is it's turned into a tax avoidant generational wealth transfer system for the financier class. Nice work if you can get it. Academia supports the system with hype-filled pronouncements about how future tech (AI, RISC-V, Battery Tech, WISC, etc.) will completely revolutionize the world. Analysts who should have been taught skepticism when corporate leaders imply their startup will have a market value in excess of western Europe's GDP, jump on board to avoid looking like idiots on the off chance the firms they cover do take off. Tech investing isn't a scam, there are definitely corners that are producing solid tech. But they're few and far between and very often not involved in the VC economy.
- bjt 2y ago> I have this theory that there's institutional money burning a hole in various institution's collective pockets. That was very much the case before the Fed started raising interest rates. The term "zero interest rate phenomenon" was created to describe it. Now that rates are up, people sitting on piles of money can just put it to work in more traditional lending (e.g. buying bonds) instead of needing to look around for weird startups to put it in.
- freeqaz 2y agoMy head immediately jumps to YikYak but I know there were some others in this domain 10 years ago. I can't think of many recently though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak
- synicalx 2y agoAh Yik Yak was fun, until it got kind of... dark.
- mikestew 2y agoToo many syllables in the name, and too much functionality. I refer you to Yo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
- vgbm 2y agoInteresting, I didn’t realize that the “Bro” app from Silicon Valley was based off of a real app.
- mikestew 2y agoI don't believe I've seen anything in the TV show Silicon Valley that wasn't based on something IRL. Dig around on anything that appears in that show, and I defy you to find something that the writers just pulled out of their ass.
- mikeodds 2y agoI think that might have been Yo, which I actually enjoyed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) super dystopian channels got setup on there like get a yo everytime a missle alert came in Israel
- mikestew 2y agoI think that might have been Yo... Ya think? I mean, whatever could parent be referring to? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037336 (or let your eyes go drift four lines above your own comment).
- daft_pink 2y agoAs anyone who lived through the dot com era…. a lot. Thanks for the comic. It was great.
- mrbluecoat 2y agoRemember the dot-com bubble? Teenagers making millions creating simple static sites for desperate clients.. :D
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tsunamifury 2y agoThis isn’t just a poorly made joke it’s also not even making fun of the right thing. The vast majority of investment is inside of public firms into themselves for ai. VCs have actually broadly been sidelines as they both lack the capital to make major moves nor see small enough direct application to invest. There are plenty of jokes to be made about AI, this is a dumb one.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> vast majority of investment is inside of public firms into themselves for ai FAANG spent $114bn on R&D in 2022 [1]. VC funded nearly 4x that amount [2]. There are valid complaints about the state of venture capital. Lack of money isn't one of them. [1] https://www.calcbench.com/blog/post/676274365248274432/charting-big-rd-spenders https://www.calcbench.com/blog/post/676274365248274432/chart... [2] https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/en/gii-insights-blog/2023/venture-capital-2023.html https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/en/gii-insights...
- debo_ 2y agoAs a sampling exercise, go here: https://a16z.com/portfolio/ https://a16z.com/portfolio/ Select AI as focus area, choose your stage of choice, "Active." Then look here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24&batch=W24&tags=AI https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24&batch=W24&ta... Combine that with JumpCrisscross's comment, and your take seems passing strange.
- breck 2y agoI thought this was going to be a long form essay/prank/experiment, where someone launched a crowd funding campaign for a "transparently idiotic startup", and pulled off a $1M raise. Ironically however, if you were to do that well, it would show high intelligence and creativity, which would probably make it an actual good investment.
- causi 2y agoLike a lot. Didn't YC even fund that startup that wanted to turn middle class suburban homeowners into slumlords by building rental poverty shacks in their back yards?
- doctorpangloss 2y agoI don’t know what startup you are mocking, but this is a very bad faith way to characterize building ADUs cheaply. You don’t know the first thing about housing, besides making drama about it.
- retrocryptid 2y ago[flagged]
- causi 2y agoMulti-family units and rezoning single family plots is great. Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition.
- renewiltord 2y agoPoor people are not children or animals. You can allow for them to just choose not to live in the backyard. For the right price I might have gladly done this. But this is the great debate of our generation, I suppose. Are people capable of making choices or not?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition I would have loved to have had this option in college. Glad my landlord saved me from humiliation! (And let us be honest, for every useful idiot who thinks they're helping the poor by constraining their options there are ten homeowners who don't want poor people in their neighbourhood.)
- mikestew 2y agoYou're thinking of Pippin[0], and yours is about the most uncharitable take I can imagine, and I wasn't even a fan of the idea. [0] https://spencerburleigh.com/blog/2022/12/21/shutdown/ https://spencerburleigh.com/blog/2022/12/21/shutdown/
- candiddevmike 2y agoThe weird thing with AI startups is the funding is kind of smoke and mirrors. So much of the funding is tied up in NVDA, MSFT, GOOGL, or AMZN incentives that the actual cash value is... murky. May be hard to pay salaries with GPU credits.
- matsemann 2y agoAnd how many of these companies' customers are just other VC funded startups burning money and buying services adjacent to their own? Like a bigger circle.
- pixiemaster 2y agoyes that’s the real bubble here. it’s practically a pyramid scheme owned by the hyperscalers.
- Y_Y 2y agoWelcome to the New Old Kingdom
- WalterSear 2y agoGPU credits are certainly paying salaries at NVDA. https://justdario.com/2024/05/no-nvidia-is-only-one-piece-of-a-bigger-fraudulent-puzzle/ https://justdario.com/2024/05/no-nvidia-is-only-one-piece-of...
- throwaway4pp24 2y ago[flagged]
- lumost 2y agoThe recent Mistral announcement is telling, the model was trained as a "collaboration" with NVidia.
- modeless 2y agoI would watch a remake of "The Producers" set in Silicon Valley with startups instead of Broadway productions. For those unfamiliar, it's about guys who fraudulently resell the same shares in the profit of a Broadway production 25 times over, and then try to ensure that it's a failure so there won't be any profit to pay, but accidentally create a success and are ruined.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThat's one of my go-to daily comics.
- bmitc 2y agoIt's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness. Self-driving cars, VR, EVs, AI, and so on. People soon realize that you can't just take a bunch of hipster tech employees and suddenly create non-solutions that need to have problems created for them to even be solutions, much less choosing extremely hard and ill-defined non-solutions. I truly wonder how much of the U.S. economy has slowed down because of all this wasted effort. Is it really a good idea for every company to try and reinvent what a company is? Every startup I've been spends a non-zero amount on just re-figuring out how to be organized, how to manage people and projects, and even just figuring out the logistics and tech needed to run a company. It's a lot of wasted effort, time, and money. My time at startups has been the least effective portions of my career. Real work actually moves quite slowly at startups, in my experience.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoWill be amazed if this stays the top comment. Would not be surprised if the submission gets flagged. It's the truth.
- pas 2y agoHN is not immune to hyperbole and hype. (And now it's pretty trendy to hate on startups.) While he truth is ... a lot more complicated. AR/VR was hardly a pump and dump. There are massive technical and creative challenges for both, but ... I fail to see how it was a pump and dump. (Unless you mean Faceberg and Moogle spending ridiculous amounts on it, probably because Neuromancer was pretty damn influential.) Similarly self-driving cars clearly have value (~1.3M people die each year on the roads absolutely unnecessarily, as most of them could have been prevented ... 1.3M people die of TBC, which is again preventable) If you think EV is a bubble I would like to offer you this nice prospectus of leisure activities on Venus. (Uh, one hyperbole, thanks HN!) That said EV seems the same kind of bubble as housing. The prices are high because of the demand. Battery prices (the biggest cost currently in EVs) keep going down. Demand is going up. Heatwaves are pretty good marketing "for" global warming.
- 2y ago
- mustafa_pasi 2y agoBut overall this is good. Why should we complain? Why would I rather have VCs hoarding their capital?
- retrocryptid 2y agobecause it has positive economic externalities and avoids the moral hazard of enabling hucksters. i have no problem with investment, but investing in an obviously stupid startup just cause they were launched by a friend's kids doesn't seem like a way to allocate capital that Adam Smith would appreciate.
- 7e 2y agoAsk Y Combinator, they specialize in this garbage.
- foreigner 2y agoThe important thing to understand here is that you shouldn't write on a latex balloon with a Sharpie. It works well for a while, but when the balloon inevitably pops or deflates, the Sharpie ink will re-liquify and get all over the place. Then you will learn the meaning of the phrase "indelible on porous surfaces".
- function_seven 2y agoEverything you just wrote has made me understand that I should write on a balloon with a Sharpie. This sounds fun. Thanks.
- helpfulContrib 2y agoExcept the balloon is a metaphor and the ink is hubris.
- chankstein38 2y agoCover that bad boy top to bottom for a real octopus-reaction-like experience!
- bilsbie 2y agoI lost a couch to this.
- Modified3019 2y agoIt should be noted, there are a variety of chemicals that will dissolve and carry away the ink from most things if you look for it. Of note, rubbing alcohol and paper towels work well. Likewise, the paint markers which I make use of are easily removed by rubbing alcohol.
- godelski 2y agoThere's a useful trick many educators know: if someone uses sharpie on your whiteboard, draw over it with another whiteboard marker and you can wipe it up like normal. Also applies to glass and some other surfaces. Essentially the same process you're mentioning but different chemicals. But always be careful with solvents. If water or isopropyl alcohol (IPA) doesn't work, you should know what you're doing/using.
- wnc3141 2y agoWhile some people can raise a ton of money for ideas that don't seem to make sense, the majority of others won't raise a dime. It's a matter of access (which could be a signal for early investors ability to cash in for later investors.) For investors in the art market, they will invest in some artists and not others, irrespective of how appealing the art is, as provenance is the signal for ROI.
- hidelooktropic 2y agoI didn't see a signup link for the AI balloon?
- danielodievich 2y agoSMBC is a treasure, just like XKCD. Zach's and Kelly's books are quite nicely, some like Soonish are just good accessible futurism/science reading, their comic collections are excellent, and they aren't afraid to offend. For example, I was part of their initial Kickstarter for The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness https://hivemill.com/products/pocket-bible https://hivemill.com/products/pocket-bible and now I have a much-easier-to-get-through-and-considerably-more-fun Bible with Zach's signature. It has provided for much silliness at many parties in my house. I don't rotate in baptist/fundamentalist circles though, those would probably be aghast at it.
- burnished 2y agoHis rendition of Beowulf is frankly incredible.
- everyone 2y agoI mean it's all about who you know.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 2y agoHi. I’m an artist. If you have a transparently idiotic startup idea and contacts with a lot of dumb money looking for unicorns to fund, drop me a line, I can use AI to create logos and promotional imagery for only a few thousand dollars up front and a small percentage of the VC investments you get. The AI in question is Adobe Illustrator but if it gets us in front of more dumb money to say it’s the other AI then I do not care.
- ein0p 2y agoCan’t help but think that all of FANGS would have seemed to be “transparently idiotic” early on. I mean, creating yet another search engine with no business plan is pretty idiotic. As is creating yet another social network or a book store. Come to think of it, all of the “v1.0” projects I worked on seemed pretty idiotic too and I thought they’d never make money. A good number of them have $1B+ yearly revenues today. To me the takeaway is: aside from the truly clinica cases, you can never tell what will take off and what won’t.