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It'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 ne

• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  Will be amazed if this stays the top comment. Would not be surprised if the submission gets flagged. It's the truth.
  • pas 2y ago
    HN 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.
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness But we retain the solutions that work. A slime mold tries a bunch of useless paths in a maze before it finds the right one. Then it trims and reinforces. Most start-ups failing isn't a sure sign of wasted work.
  • bmitc 2y ago
    What startups have provided lasting real solutions and value, not just capitalistic, in say the last decade?
    • pas 2y ago
      Beyond Meat is pretty neat. Ceph? (Inktank was founded in 2011 by Sage Weil and DreamHost, which then it raised 1M in 2012 from Mark Shuttleworth, then RedHat bought them for 175M in 2014. Seems like a nice startup stort, no? The project itself was started around 2004 by Weil at LLNL, and then he worked on it as part of his PhD still in 2007, then the work continued at DreamHost, probably because Weil is one of the co-founders of DreamHost.)
    • tim333 2y ago
      OpenAI? (Founded 2015)
    • sobellian 2y ago
      This will be tough to answer because you've supplied a vague standard. According to the Unabomber, electricity is not a real solution. Where shall we sit on the spectrum?
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > What startups have provided lasting real solutions and value, not just capitalistic, in say the last decade Deel, Rippling, Redwood Materials, Convoy, Airtable, Anduril, Cerebral, Checkr and Cerebras were all founded since 2014. Pick one. We're currently seeing an explosion in creativity around satellites, autonomous vehicles (on the road, indoors and airborne), generative AI and biotechnology. Go back one more cycle and we have SpaceX, Tesla, Uber & Lyft, Moderna, Zoom, DoorDash and other giants that entered busy fields, survived the winnowing and basically created a new industry.
• dustingetz 2y ago
  capital is a market you can bootstrap any other ideas? main problem is that startup equity is not a good deal for anyone at all until after PMF
• nrb 2y ago
  I dunno, for all the perceived (and real) failures, the last few generations of these experiments have spawned some of the highest earning, and arguably transformative, companies in history.
  • bmitc 2y ago
    Which ones?
    • edanm 2y ago
      Which huge companies were spawned from the last few decades of startups raising VC? I think almost all the biggest companies today? Here's a list I grabbed of the highest market-cap companies: 1. Apple 2. Microsoft 3. NVIDIA 4. Alphabet (Google) 5. Amazon 6. Saudi Aramco 7. Meta Platforms (Facebook) 8. Berkshire Hathaway 9. TSMC 10. Tesla Of this list, here are "startups" that raised VC money: 1. Apple 2. Microsoft 3. NVIDIA 4. Alphabet (Google) 5. Amazon 6. Meta Platforms (Facebook) 7. Tesla So more than half of the top-10 biggest companies today were these kinds of startup "experiments". And of course, these are just the biggest companies, and don't include many things I interact with on a day-to-day basis, which are incredibly valuable to me, e.g. Netflix, ChatGPT, YouTube (part of Alphabet but important enough to warrant mentioning), etc.
    • antihero 2y ago
      Challenger banks have been pretty great for all their failings, at least in the UK. Can’t believe people actually used to charge you for being broke. E2E encrypted messaging that is accessible to people and works using data has been transformative. Twitter has changed the landscape of communication. Streaming music and video services have changed the way people consume media and shaped the way it’s created and broadcast.
• ertgbnm 2y ago
  Private equity has mastered this formula in the last decade. Throw as many unrelated businesses that you can buy for pennies on the dollar into a basket. Claim it is now diversified. Decrease expenses by allowing all of your good employees to run for the hills screaming while not replacing them. Post one year of record profits by sacrificing quality in the name of quantity. Re-capitalize in order to generate a massive return. And then rinse and repeat on your next victims, I mean ventures.
• BobbyJo 2y ago
  This is simply not true. Most startup founders are genuinely trying to build something that has value to the economy, and therefore society. Most fail early, most of what's left fails later, but some go on to be real, profitable, businesses. That's how it works outside of the startup world too. Most restaurants, clothing stores, car repair shops, etc. go out of business after just a few years, while a few move on to become large chains and the like.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    > Most startup founders are genuinely trying to get wealthy, and not really good 9-5 job wealthy. Properly wealthy.
    • BobbyJo 2y ago
      Both? Most humans on earth are trying to get wealthy, they just don't see a viable path in front of them.
      • blitzar 2y ago
        Most humans on earth are trying to survive, they just don't see a viable path in front of them
        • AbstractH24 2y ago
          This comment really points out how this message board and tech in general are not reflective of most humans on earth
        • BobbyJo 2y ago
          Global life expectancy is like 73. Life is hard, but lets not pretend most humans are wandering a wasteland in search of water.
          • blitzar 2y ago
            1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water, sure it isn't 'most people' but it is 2.6 billion people.
• jonny_eh 2y ago
  Nothing proved the emperor has no clothes better than the crypto trend.
  • normie3000 2y ago
    if anything, crypto seems to have proven that the emperor is happy in his nudity.
    • tim333 2y ago
      The core use of crypto in practice is gambling/speculation. People say that isn't a real business because they don't like it but human nature is what it is. Casinos, lotteries and bookies don't seem to be dying out, or crypto for that matter.
  • burnished 2y ago
    Well at least it gave many of us the opportunity to practice asking 'in simple terms whats the core value of your proposition?'
• nyxtom 2y ago
  Idk there are some truly incredible VR setups now for sim games that I am having a blast with. More of this please
• carterklein13 2y ago
  I personally think this will be one of the biggest "what the hell were we thinking" ideas to come out of the still-developing hangover of the 2013-2023 startup space. From my perspective, the once-startups that are now big companies are the ones who focused ONLY on solving a real and immediate problem with happy, motivated employees. Every industry has inefficiencies to improve upon. Most employees want normal hours, a 401K, some benefits, and clear performance reviews. There's still a ton of work to do at cool-but-not-the-absolute-cutting-edge startups.
• gumby 2y ago
  > It's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The reality is that a very tiny percentage of new companies get institutional financing at all (and the majority of those that do aren't technical and aren't startups in the sense that they aren't intended to be high growth at a high margin). The loud press that makes it sound otherwise is just survivorship bias.
• godelski 2y ago
  > I truly wonder how much of the U.S. economy has slowed down because of all this wasted effort. I wonder how frequently startups and hype KILL technologies. A technology starts to show progress, everyone gets excited about that progress, tons of money gets dumped in, everyone rushes to put that technology into production, technology flops, funding for technology dries up. Meanwhile, a lot of people got very rich, so we repeat the cycle. But there was an important step missed here if we want a technology to actually succeed. Research. The hype train only seems to gear up for technologies that are still in their infancies. This of course makes sense, because how else do you raise money? Chicken and the egg. But the problem here is that you're not using that money to solve the problems with the tech and get it to the point where it could then be effectively used in things, but instead rush to hamfist it into everything you can. Sometimes you gotta slow down first, and prep for the sprint. Google seems to be the worst at this, routinely killing projects that 5-10 years later are then sold as high status items. A company with that much capital doesn't need to rush to market, you can strategize and take your time. The problem is that the details always matter and they can be a huge make it or break it for a technology. You can generate all the safe miles you want, but if you run through a red light anytime there's a child holding a green balloon a bit too high, you failed. You can build fancy games, but if you promise a holodeck and deliver a hollowdeck, people are reasonably upset. Hype is a double edged sword. You need some to get people on board, but too much and you overpromise. You can build crazy and legitimately helpful tools, but if you're (or others) are promising 10x what you can, then when they get their hands on it they have every right to be upset. Even if the thing is still useful to them and betters their lives. They are rightfully upset, but they'll unrightfully dismiss what you made. So the people who benefit from the hype cycles are the grifters. The ones willing to jump from one thing to the next. Which is why I'm always very confused why we prop up people who have "expertise" in all the last hype bubbles as if it is credentializing why they are experts in the new hype bubble. How does a giant and brilliant red flag get interpreted as green? Maybe we're not so different from self-driving cars after all.