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This is one of those things that shouldn't have been a startup - at least not from the growth side of things. It's a nifty service that could thrive in the sma

This is one of those things that shouldn't have been a startup - at least not from the growth side of things. It's a nifty service that could thrive in the small/medium business side of things, but tech startup growth/scale and billion valuation - nah.

grues-dinner 2y ago
Maybe everything falls under that. It's taken as read that the goal is supposed to be explosive and/or exponential growth, global takeover and multi-billion valuations for everything from software frippery for getting a birthday video from the guy who voiced the cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch to chat apps and taxi bookings to hardware like phones, cars and ICs, industries like farming and mining and even services like banks. Is a monoculture of a few warring behemoths really the outcome that is ideal in the long run? At the human scale, it feels a bit like being a bystander (byfloater?) in a kayak during a nuclear naval battle. A bit like real ecology, an ecosystem is said to be thriving most when there's a diverse and dynamic mix, with nothing particularly dominating. Though of course the agricultural output of such an environment is lower than 10000 acres of monospecies wheat fields tended by 30-plus-ton tractors[1]. I wonder what a world would look like if it were disallowed for any company or ownership group to exceed a certain size. Economies of scale would maybe then be more acheivable though federation and cooperation rather than monopolism, lawfare and secrecy. And before libertarians start shouting or hiding under the bed, it's more a shower thought, rather then my personal NWO agenda. And I'm aware it would require more than national-level edicts. [1]: A problem in itself: https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosaurs-mechanical-threat-soil/ https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosa...
kristopolous 2y ago
That's the problem with tech startup culture. $10 million businesses get pumped and stretched to be $1 billion speculations and they collapse so now you don't have useful $10 million service any more. It's like demanding every car on the road must be modified to be a souped up sports car that goes 300 mph and you're totally willing to destroy the vehicle in the process. Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane."
- dmix 2y ago
  > Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane." Well to be fair, if they were all insane then these VC's would have gone out of business long ago. Every year we get one of these big VC bomb news cycles, with this same narrative in the comments that the valuation system is broken and VCs are out of touch, but they still seem to be getting sufficient ROI to be successful as the only niche capital market available to startups. It's still possible these persistent edge cases where VCs all jump onto the latest social trends are far higher risk than they properly account for among their executive staff, but that doesn't mean the whole idea is flawed... it's also possible they have accounted for this risk and think they can eat occasional social-trend play hoping for a Facebook. idk I'm not a VC.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    The private profit model works because there are unicorns. The problem is you really can't make a horse into a unicorn and doing so comes at the cost of something called "the public good", something that investment capital used to feel an obligation to until about 30 years ago, before everything got Jack Welchified. It's hyper growth and catastrophic collapse, as a business practice. Investors are in for the growth and the costumers and employees are holding the bag during the collapse. This practice has come to pollute conventional sectors as well. Look at the stock ticker $BIG, belonging to the retailer Big Lots or RiteAid. They'll come in, ride it on the way up through unsustainable debt based growth to make line go up, liquidate their profits and leave it to collapse and burn
  - OccamsMirror 2y ago
    VCs will make their money even from companies that eventually flop. The whole is a great example of Greater Fool Theory: https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/institutionalized-belief-in-the-greater https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/institutionalized-b...
    - dmix 2y ago
      yeah exactly, this is a way to account for this dumb losses because even when it bombs it's still credible enough to have another dummy
JohnBooty 2y ago
God, yeah. This "unicorn or nothing" attitude is so absolutely toxic. There are so many business models that could effectively work and generate hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars of profit but our weirdo obsession with "it has to become the next Tesla or Uber or Apple or NVidia, or it's CRAP" is just awful. I'm not sure whether to blame VC, or "normal" investors for simply not seeing the value in a profitable business whose ceiling doesn't involve trillions of dollars.

grues-dinner 2y ago

Maybe everything falls under that. It's taken as read that the goal is supposed to be explosive and/or exponential growth, global takeover and multi-billion valuations for everything from software frippery for getting a birthday video from the guy who voiced the cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch to chat apps and taxi bookings to hardware like phones, cars and ICs, industries like farming and mining and even services like banks. Is a monoculture of a few warring behemoths really the outcome that is ideal in the long run? At the human scale, it feels a bit like being a bystander (byfloater?) in a kayak during a nuclear naval battle. A bit like real ecology, an ecosystem is said to be thriving most when there's a diverse and dynamic mix, with nothing particularly dominating. Though of course the agricultural output of such an environment is lower than 10000 acres of monospecies wheat fields tended by 30-plus-ton tractors[1]. I wonder what a world would look like if it were disallowed for any company or ownership group to exceed a certain size. Economies of scale would maybe then be more acheivable though federation and cooperation rather than monopolism, lawfare and secrecy. And before libertarians start shouting or hiding under the bed, it's more a shower thought, rather then my personal NWO agenda. And I'm aware it would require more than national-level edicts. [1]: A problem in itself: https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosaurs-mechanical-threat-soil/ https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosa...

kristopolous 2y ago

That's the problem with tech startup culture. $10 million businesses get pumped and stretched to be $1 billion speculations and they collapse so now you don't have useful $10 million service any more. It's like demanding every car on the road must be modified to be a souped up sports car that goes 300 mph and you're totally willing to destroy the vehicle in the process. Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane."

dmix 2y ago
> Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane." Well to be fair, if they were all insane then these VC's would have gone out of business long ago. Every year we get one of these big VC bomb news cycles, with this same narrative in the comments that the valuation system is broken and VCs are out of touch, but they still seem to be getting sufficient ROI to be successful as the only niche capital market available to startups. It's still possible these persistent edge cases where VCs all jump onto the latest social trends are far higher risk than they properly account for among their executive staff, but that doesn't mean the whole idea is flawed... it's also possible they have accounted for this risk and think they can eat occasional social-trend play hoping for a Facebook. idk I'm not a VC.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  The private profit model works because there are unicorns. The problem is you really can't make a horse into a unicorn and doing so comes at the cost of something called "the public good", something that investment capital used to feel an obligation to until about 30 years ago, before everything got Jack Welchified. It's hyper growth and catastrophic collapse, as a business practice. Investors are in for the growth and the costumers and employees are holding the bag during the collapse. This practice has come to pollute conventional sectors as well. Look at the stock ticker $BIG, belonging to the retailer Big Lots or RiteAid. They'll come in, ride it on the way up through unsustainable debt based growth to make line go up, liquidate their profits and leave it to collapse and burn
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  VCs will make their money even from companies that eventually flop. The whole is a great example of Greater Fool Theory: https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/institutionalized-belief-in-the-greater https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/institutionalized-b...
  - dmix 2y ago
    yeah exactly, this is a way to account for this dumb losses because even when it bombs it's still credible enough to have another dummy

JohnBooty 2y ago

God, yeah. This "unicorn or nothing" attitude is so absolutely toxic. There are so many business models that could effectively work and generate hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars of profit but our weirdo obsession with "it has to become the next Tesla or Uber or Apple or NVidia, or it's CRAP" is just awful. I'm not sure whether to blame VC, or "normal" investors for simply not seeing the value in a profitable business whose ceiling doesn't involve trillions of dollars.