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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

• bell-cot 2y ago
  Obvious addition: 5. 1 != 6 I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013? If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of those industries?
  • sakex 2y ago
    > I have some doubt about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013? Yes but big tech got bigger. Google had a 4th of its current workforce for instance, Meta a 10th, etc. It got much easier to get into those companies.
  • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. The problem typically is government regulations.
    • akho 2y ago
      A modern airplane cannot be built on a bicycle shop budget, regardless of regulations in force.
• lm28469 2y ago
  > the financial argument for startups becomes harder to justify. Given the failure rate I think it's always been hard to justify for the vast majority of people.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    If they're being realistic, for sure, but there was a period where investor money was flowing freely and the news of investment rounds, IPOs, and individual financial success was a regular occurrence on HN. I don't know if that has lessened, but the discourse around it definitely has.
• tossandthrow 2y ago
  IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia. Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it. For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
  • MrLeap 2y ago
    > I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
    • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      > The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former. Bozo brainrot
  • sureglymop 2y ago
    I highly agree. And I think in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. I think part of the reason why is that all over social media and the internet there are gurus telling people "you can be the next to be rich and you deserve it". But that's the wrong motivation to have ingrained in every potential founder.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.
• high_na_euv 2y ago
  >The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find. Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff? Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on
• fxtentacle 2y ago
  I believe the main change is just that Hacker News went from being a very specific subset of the population to becoming much more mainstream. Ten years ago it was, at least in my opinion, mostly early adopters of internet technology and in general people who had enough funds that they could fail without being devastated. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.
  • checker659 2y ago
    I can't say I agree. There were a lot of app developers on HN even as far back as 2009.
    • righthand 2y ago
      You should watch the Arstechnica homepage then. They have authors who essentially get all their writing assignments based on how popular a story is ranking on this website. That is pretty mainstream.
  • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    > Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks. When I first started hanging around HN (around 2011 or so), the general vibe seemed much more like indie-hacker types to me, lots of anger at VCs and the hockey stick growth required. Honestly though, the following decade was a massive tech bull market which presumably pulled lots of HN denizens in (including me). Maybe we're getting back to that a little bit with tech layoffs and potential opportunities in other industries.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dcminter 2y ago
  > What's changed? Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much. But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed. I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause. PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.
  • jajko 2y ago
    This is just another public website, various people come here since its interesting and discussions engaging. Its one of the last places which is free/public and discussions don't immediately turn primitive, political and emotional unlike rest of internet. People from various backgrounds come and have interesting things to say, which is often refreshing and enlightening (at least to this fella). Many if not most of folks at this point have nothing to do with neither startups nor hacking. Neither do I for example, and I am here for a decade+.
  • NoboruWataya 2y ago
    > I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers. I started using this place a lot more in the last couple of years as Reddit went to shit, so I suspect that was a big driving force in changing the audience here.
    • Macha 2y ago
      This was always me, and I've been here 15 years. It was pretty much a tech forum then (arguably more then than now, there's much more discussion of culture war issues now, even when stories are flagged it's ever-present in the comments). I think the time when HN was primarily startups was much further back and much briefer than most people nostalgically remember.
• digitcatphd 2y ago
  All of the arguments presented in this were equally true in 2013 as they are in 2025 and there are many more dimensions than you are taking into consideration. For instance, the demographics of HN users could have changed, or the economic climate is cyclically more defensive and 'risk off', which is well known. I suspect this is more related to economic cycles than a cultural paradigm shift and would suggest the author to think more deeply than forming vague generalizations around some HN comments of anonymous users.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    In 2013, the Ponzi scheme of VC investing still existed. The VCs could pawn off their money losing companies to the public market, sell their equity fast and watch the stock either quickly decline or stay flat. The public got wise.
    • digitcatphd 2y ago
      Economic cycles. As soon as the next cycle builds up momentum all the low risk entrepreneurs will rush in again.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        Where will they get the funding if not from VCs? What will motivate VCs if not large potential exits?
        • digitcatphd 2y ago
          Don't make me tap the sign.
          • scarface_74 2y ago
            ????
• Temporary_31337 2y ago
  Pretend all you want but interest rates make a ton of difference. If you can make a safe, compounded, perhaps leveraged 5% from treasuries the financial bar that a successful startup has to pass is so much higher
  • benjaminwootton 2y ago
    Interest rates are like a dial which turns economic activity up and down. I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild. A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold. It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!
    • jajko 2y ago
      If you were older, you would still consider current rates low and recent past an obscurity that couldn't last long. I can say that definitely about Europe, ie here in Switzerland interest rates used to be around 7% for quite some time and economy was doing fine, then it dropped to negative and afterwards people complained when they rose to 1-2%. 0.4% now, not complaining.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • arccy 2y ago
        If you're that old, you probably already have a house when it was much cheaper relative to income levels. Now, a tiny shift in interests rates affects not only the general economy, but people paying back mortgages which can take a significant chunk out of your income.
        • adamc 2y ago
          Yeah. I lost my house in a divorce, and it was quite a shock when I looked at the "new" pricing. Not sure that can last.
• gizmo 2y ago
  Scenario 1: an ambitious guy in his early twenties fails and writes anonymously about how it feels to see your company collapse and your investors shun you. He felt alone and ashamed and he had to pick himself up. Scenario 2: a guy who already made millions in tech and who is a venture capitalist on the side coyly brags about his business failures. Can you see how they are not the same?
• aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  Concerning > 4. The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find. I disagree: In my feeling truly innovative opportunities are still rather easy to find. I feel what rather changed is that with VC becoming big and mainstream, investors have become more risk-averse in investing into innovative ideas (that they don't really understand). Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.
  • graemep 2y ago
    > Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder. Customers are more locked into existing products. Network effects, switching costs, familiarity and branding, staff training (for businesses) and learning something new....
    • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      I'd claim that also before the customers were locked into existing product. What is different is that in former days they were much more willing to get away from this lock-in. The reason for this that I consider to be the most plausible one is that society has become more conservative (i.e. less willing to change things or try out new things).
      • graemep 2y ago
        Lock is has been a problem for a long time, but I think the lock in is stronger. You have dependencies between multiple systems, dependencies between systems, data that is no longer stored locally on machines you control, etc.
    • escapecharacter 2y ago
      Strongly agree here that there is platform lock-in; all the large platforms are playing subtle games to make it harder to explore new services outside them. To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms. I really wish the US government was more pro-business competition; they're merely pro-business in terms of ensuring existing winners continue to win. Across the pond, the EU seems to get this with measures like GDPR which make it actually easier to port between platforms.
• bwg2000 2y ago
  It seems like there's an expectation of having to get investment as quickly as possible for your company in order for it be "worth doing", which feels counter-intuitive. It sucks that this is the first thought and must prevent a lot of good stuff ever getting started. At least in the UK, a 300k salary for a senior developer is not plausible for most people. But the idea of growing a something slowly, without investment and reaching that sort of income definitely seems more likely. I guess it's all different circumstances!
• gunian 2y ago
  extrapolating from one post instead of total Series A-F raised without accounting for interest rates as well as political motivations to weaken tech seems a bit sensational imo
• KaiserPro 2y ago
  I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out. As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-millions being handed out turned out to be legends. Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money. The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.
  • paulsutter 2y ago
    The best reason to join a startup is to learn how to create a startup. That’s the main thing you won’t get at a FANG job.
  • itake 2y ago
    > The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way. Or the startup was a stepping stone in your career. Big Tech wouldn't hire you, b/c you have a different background, so you work at a startup to develop experience and then switch to Big Tech.
    • praptak 2y ago
      Then go from a CTO to an L4 at Google.
      • liontwist 2y ago
        and that’s a good thing! As you get a little older and your life needs more stability (oh no I only make 400k at my 9-5)
    • KaiserPro 2y ago
      I mean yeah kinda. But the skills for a startup map poorly to big companies. Startup: you look at something, plan, execute, learn skills as you go. Big company: here is x, do as I say. You must use these things from these teams, don't make it yourself. Coping with the step down in responsibility is hard. Going from owning the entire stack to not even having a real decision in planning is very hard to deal with, especially if you've done that $thing before, and have to mount effectively an election campaign to change direction.
• egl2020 2y ago
  I've worked at startups and at a FAANG. For many years, I've told people that they should never do a startup for the $$$; their expected value is higher at a FAANG. They should do a startup only if they're interested in the technology or the people.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Or if they have everything lined up already - idea, investors, customers, staff, support network, etc. That said, even then, within the established tech companies there is space for innovation; if you can sell your idea within the company you work for, you have a lot more chance of success, and if you fail, you still have a job at least and / or you got paid during.
• DrScientist 2y ago
  Dot com bubble mark 2 coming? I see a lot of naivety in some of the AI startups - excited by the AI - but not really understanding the business they are trying to apply it to. Also a lot of carnivorous sheep and grifters attracted by the money.
• mittermayr 2y ago
  I had one product that took off, made more money than at any of my previous (big-tech) jobs, and I thought the tales were true. If you work hard enough, catch a lucky wave and have the skills to ride it, you're free. The product peaked, and then very quickly dropped to zero in about two years, while I tried everything to prevent going out of business. Back at the bottom, a year or two of aimless wandering, I figured, well, I've seen the light, I know how this dance needs to be danced, I can dance it one more time. I've since had half a dozen attempts not even produce a handful of accounts (or in the better cases, paid accounts), and it's simply not sustainable. I was finally getting to a point where I felt ready to give up last year, and decided to try one last time or get back into a regular job. The problem being, "getting back" now means that I am 20 years older and more than likely _not a great fit_ for many of the roles out there. So, for now, I am once again knuckle-deep in a new product, about to have a first customer this week (if they sign up) and some light on the horizon. Yet, even if I manage to surpass all the possible stretch-goals on growth I have set this year, it will still pay considerably less than minimum wage, and that's if everything (and more) works out within this and the next year or so. On occasional consulting gigs I charge $$$, and I don't even dare to compare that to what these Saas/products bring in, is just ... sad. And I hear someone clacking on their keyboard already, responding... The usual reaction to a post like mine will and used to be: well, you've got the wrong product, audience, or both. But all I want to say after doing this for 20 years now, is: that's the default. If you're not starting from a large-enough platform, your only way to success is to be literally "failing" upwards, in baby steps, turtle-speed, and that only results in success if you can somehow sustain doing that long enough. The default is that nothing works out. People love to skip over this and always feel it doesn't apply to them and their idea. It will fail. The game is not to make a great product, the game is to figure out how to not go under while waiting for and/or constantly provoking your lucky break. You can get lucky, and if you try long enough and often enough, you at least stand somehwat of a (very, very, very slim) chance. And, then, even if you do, all that luck is very brief and temporary and you'll be thirsty waiting for the next strike to stay above water. There is no "I made it" — there's only "I'm safe for a second, but what do I do next" in the very best of cases. All that said, I believe it is totally worth the life experience. Life is short, it's a noteworthy thing to go through. But after a decade of failing, it'll quietly turn into a question of character, responsibility, psychological or social issues and general life-planning skills rather than a question of "do you want it hard enough to succeed". Life is short.
• marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I see this a lot in the local startup community too. There's a lot of "ecosystem" feeders who survive on the supply of newbies, but the old experienced founders have mostly either exited and retired, want nothing to do with the startup scene any more, or have just given up and got a job. The buzz from 10-15 years ago just isn't there any more.
• mrtksn 2y ago
  I'm not sure that there's a startup winter at all, it looks like a web browser tech winter to me. AFAIK YC also changed their focus and now are looking for physical things much more - like supersonic jets. There is only so much you can do with organizing information and entertainment through HTML and JS and make a profit of it. Maybe there will be a nice whiplash gold rush for making the web great again as this pile of garbage doesn't inspire anyone anymore. That will happen as soon as a new business model alternative to what caused the enshittification appears. Alternatively, maybe a new tech will emerge that will offer freedoms and possibilities similar to the early days of the web.
  • jpatten 2y ago
    Yeah I agree. The market for companies that do something in a web browser may be saturated, but outside of that world it feels like there are more opportunities than ever. For example in the space of AI + robotics we’ve barely scratched the surface. I wonder if part of what’s happening may be a generational shift in how people in and around the startup world view work/life balance. In my limited experience, GenZ folks tend to place a premium on reasonable working hours, so it’s not surprising they would evaluate the trade offs between startups and big tech differently.
    • adamc 2y ago
      That makes sense, but are most of those newer opportunities more straight engineering and not software engineering?
      • jpatten 2y ago
        I'm biased but I think the most interesting opportunities involve software that interacts with the physical world in some way. These projects will definitely involve some electrical + mechanical engineering, product design etc., but I'd guess that in terms of number of hours worked, they are still more software engineering than any other single discipline. Probably with a very different set of tools than those used on the web.
• schappim 2y ago
  It is insane I have to say this, but this quite literally is the best time ever to start a startup. The sheer leverage that AI provides founders today is simply astounding. I have leveraged AI tools to build things I would never have been able to build just several years ago. The case in point would be it is now extremely easy to create Chrome plugins that automate aspects of my business simply by asking Claude to do so. Another example I can point to is the use of GPT to create documentation for government tenders. Many of these tenders need supporting documents that, quite frankly, I would not have been able to create on my own. Everything from how to create documentation around modern slavery and supply chain audits, to indigenous inclusion. This is stuff they simply don't teach you at university. We are living in a golden age where a solo founder can create so much value on their own. This is not to say I'm not worried for the future, I very much am. I'm worried about an economic routing of the middle class caused by AI taking white-collar jobs...
  • chrisrickard 2y ago
    10% agree Marcus!
    • schappim 2y ago
      Only 10%?
      • kevindamm 2y ago
        Maybe the other 90% is already spoken for, by investors and shareholders?
  • mezod 2y ago
    great take, do you mind to elaborate on the last point? :)
    • schappim 2y ago
      By way of background, we sell STEM electronics hardware that has really low margin because it's designed to be excessively priced for education. This need to be extremely efficient has caused us to do all sorts of things, like create shipping and fulfillment robots that pick products from the shelf and help our pickers and packers out[1]. I found that it's a lot harder to do things with atoms than just software. As a company, we have been able to automate a bunch of work that would have been previously done by an office admin. I believe this style of white-collar jobs is particularly vulnerable to automation. I have two main concerns. One is that the folks with white-collar jobs that would buy our products will no longer have the economic means to do so. The second is, well, a lot of our products are STEM-based, and I'm worried that educators will no longer feel the need to teach coding and electronics, because in the future there may be the view that such work will simply be done by machines, and all what a student really needs to be able to learn to do is learn how to communicate in a clear manner using english... 1. https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-that-ships-other-raspberry-pis https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-...
• anovikov 2y ago
  It's more because people have realised that money is easier made outside of public space (crypto projects, scripts, other things that just extract money out of thin air) rather than by building something public that needs clients, investors, and exits. I have yet to meet a single startup billionaire but i already know at least one person who made 1B+ through scripting and several who are in 9 digit range. It's just easier there because there is no law to abide (you are anonymous by definition, and frequently a sybil of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of fake people), and no need to "sell" or be liked by anyone. It didn't exist before ~2017 because crypto/smart contracts were not a thing yet. SEO/SEO scams existed yes, but these never brought in comparable amounts of money and traditional startups looked more attractive in comparison. Today, many people just run dozens of solana nodes, guess how much they make?
  • mezod 2y ago
    for what I understand, this is it. I am not entirely sure of what you refer to with 'scripting' though (I assume crypto related), pretty broad word in our tech world :P
  • pjc50 2y ago
    The secret ingredient is crime? (please explain "scripting" here, I don't think it means bash)
    • anovikov 2y ago
      Well, there is no notion of crime if there is no actual personality involved. It's hard to define crime on a blockchain. Scripting could be in rust of solidity for instance, but sometimes it's just python or literally bash. Prime recent example: solana mods that improve voting. Before they stopped working (as too many people started using them), hundreds of millions were made by gaining advantage in attracting stake on staking pools by those who used them while others didn't - as they could consistently get better voting performance. And a mod was just a hundred or so lines in rust.
• thom 2y ago
  Fairly sure the vast majority of Hacker News isn't making 300k a year in either big tech _or_ startups. Plus the author of the post mentioned wasn't some scrappy gung-ho founder trying to make it at any cost, they had Google money and one of their stories was their resentment at their cofounders forcing a $10m exit of one of the companies. No offence to them, it was an interesting journey described very openly, but it didn't sound like they were looking for a pep talk. I suspect Hacker News is just bigger and less skewed towards Silicon Valley than it was in 2013. Maybe that changes the vibe, but I don't think anyone is (or should be) deciding whether to do a startup based on the tone of comments on an internet forum.
• ludwigvan 2y ago
  Most engineers figured out that the options/stocks of startups are worthless.
  • consp 2y ago
    And if they are not worthless in general, they are worthless for you since you will get squeezed out because funders and founders need to take everything since they are the only ones who matter or do any work (/s obviously).
  • schappim 2y ago
    We are now also seeing companies staying private much, much longer. This is tough on the employees who quite often can't offload their equity.
    • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
      Which makes FAANG + property investing + index pension/401k + other funds etc attractive. Maybe the occasional wsb style risk for fun.
  • whstl 2y ago
    I certainly did. I have options/stocks from 3 different companies, all vested, but zero expectation of seeing any money out of it. One of them recently went belly up and had an exit for peanuts. I didn't go for big tech but I did pick a job on a YC startup that, while demanding, allowed me to purchase my own house and work on my own stuff in the evenings.
    • chamomeal 2y ago
      Your options haven’t expired since leaving those startups? I recently left a job at a startup where I had some options vested. It would be like 6k to exercise them. I was leaning towards leaving em, and now this thread has kinda convinced me
      • pcl 2y ago
• chiefalchemist 2y ago
  To be fair, who uses and comments on HN could have changed. HN cam be a great place but just as Wall Street isn't The Economy, HN isn't the whole of startup culture. Interesting to read. Worth pondering. But with limits / caveats. All that said, The Startup Industrial Complex is real. Plenty are being sucked in and spit out. That's going to impact Hearts & Minds, and comments shared.
• yason 2y ago
  I'd say starting a company to make something people want in order to sell it for money is still relevant. It's just that you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years, slowly growing the business and balancing the risks and opportunities along the way. You won't be looking for an "exit" because you want to take care of the company you built. That's a very different story from whatever vibe it is that startups acquired after the dotcom boom, i.e. find something that hasn't been done before, scales quickly, and sell the company after a few years for 1000x, and then something. That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in. Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.
  • clumsysmurf 2y ago
    > you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years > That never was sustainable, I think Another aspect with this being (un)sustainable is lack of affordable healthcare. I bet many people would take more risks if they didn't have to worry about this aspect of their lives.
    • cushychicken 2y ago
      The Swedes sure seem to think so. Per capita Swedish entrepreneurship is like 7x the rest of the euro zone, and they’re convinced that it’s that aspect of the social safety net that help prop up that high level of personal risk taking.
      • Twirrim 2y ago
• Oras 2y ago
  Starting a startup is about long-term goals. If feedback (positive or negative) can affect this journey, then this is a trace of the status quo and trying to please people, which is against the core of starting a startup. The only validation a startup should seek is paying customers or revenue. Everything else is a vanity metric. What HN comments say is irrelevant, whether positive or negative.
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  A few problems with this view: 1) Big corporations continue to struggle with doing in house innovation. Hiring more people doesn't seem to work. Just look at the infamously long and ever growing list of failed Google stuff. They are spending billions on this stuff. And most of it fails. Most large companies struggle with doing big new things in house. 2) There continue to be successful startups challenging/disrupting those big companies and occasionally scaring them into action (like acquisitions). And some of these startups are well funded. 3) Most Big Tech companies have been downsizing over the last few years. Job security maybe isn't that amazing if layoff rounds are a regular thing. And bigger salaries also means more scrutiny when layoffs happen. Also see #1: if projects aren't working out, layoffs are quick way to cut the losses. Getting caught up in one of these doomed corporate innovation things is maybe not great as a job security plan. Also, post covid, the notion of physically locating development teams close to San Francisco is no longer that much of an automatic thing. I see a lot of startups here in Berlin that only have a token presence in the US (not necessarily Silicon Valley) and do all/most of their tech in Europe. It used to be that startups would physically move to the Valley after raising money. That seems to happen much less these days. Mostly, US presence for such companies is limited to sales and marketing. And there are also lots of US startups setting up teams abroad. Why pay a premium for commodity development teams? Especially if you just raised a few million, you are on the spot to deliver. Going on a spending spree in the Valley maybe isn't the best way to do that.
  • wslh 2y ago
    I don't see your points contradicts the article in any way, it describes more variables in the scenario. The problem is the scale and the darwinist concepts. For example, while (1) is totally correct, you need ten of thousands of startups to have a few ones that are acquired by big companies. The need of big corps doesn't estimulate the creation of startups if incentives are not aligned.
    • jillesvangurp 2y ago
      You assume all value creation happens in these big companies and that the only valid exit is being acquired by them. That's not really the case. A lot of value gets created outside these companies. And every time that happens, their default mode seems to panic, do a lot of hiring and ramp up some big R&D effort. Failure seems common for these projects. And typically more expensive than doing it via startups. Just look at all the spending on AI in big tech companies. Most of it seems rushed and not really that effective. And they are all responding to each other; and to some well funded startups that are succeeding where they are failing. > you need ten of thousands of startups Just do the math. That's a few tens of billions in funding. Well within range of the R&D budgets of these large companies (individually even). And of course a lot of the investment burden and risk is shared with a wider community of investors. Their main issue is absorbing this R&D and value back into their companies. Acquisitions and acquihires aren't that effective mostly. Employing a large ineffective workforce at premium rates also isn't free and hardly a guarantee for value creation. That's why layoffs are a thing.
• croes 2y ago
  Lost its faith or its illusions?
• whiplash451 2y ago
  Counter-argument to point 2: startups now raise 10X what they used to accomodate for bigtech-level salaries. It’s not uncommon for a senior eng to join a Series A with 200-300K base. Not like it makes the ecosystem and startup math more reasonable, though...
• InkCanon 2y ago
  On the last point: "The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find." It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.
  • wslh 2y ago
    The point is about a specific technology, like software, not technology at all. For example, we continue to use the same vehicles (e.g. cars) with a well known technology while SpaceX is advancing on sending rockets to the space. Technology is advancing but some technology is well known. This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).
    • schappim 2y ago
      I 100% agree with this. It is now a lot easier to create software, but it does feel harder to reach customers, especially via Google/Meta Ads.
    • flyinglizard 2y ago
      But while cars are a well known technology, the last 15 years have spawned a 1.3T company in that space - Tesla. There's room to innovate anywhere, maybe but the most basic commodities.
      • InkCanon 2y ago
• meowface 2y ago
  While these are all valid, I'm surprised it doesn't include "it's possible Hacker News userbase demographics have shifted over the past 12 years" as an additional contributing factor.
• Havoc 2y ago
  Is this the entire industry or just ycombinator? I get the sense that they’ve been dramatically ramping up volume which inevitably has an impact on quality
• jparishy 2y ago
  FWIW on HN circa 2012 when I joined, there were people I thought were biz heroes who posted here and that made the place feel smaller, and that dynamic is gone I think. I’m not sure it can be manufactured again either, in the age of personal brands Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?
  • diggan 2y ago
    I also joined around 2012, had the same impression as you, but I still have that impression today, just that I stopped seeing anyone as a hero. But I frequently end up coming across comments that were written by people who worked on my favorite childhood PC game/book/website for example, still to this day. /bestcomments is a great place to discover these types of comments, in case someone has missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
    • jparishy 2y ago
      I think by biz heroes I mean people who I believe I can emulate and therefore want to be around more, which creates a feedback loop that makes me excited to start companies— which happened to me. I know they’re still amazing folks here, but is the feedback loop? With the passage of time I’m not who they want in the big end of that funnel anymore anyway, so maybe I just don’t see it. But the founder class back then had an appeal that they don’t today to me. I’m sure it’s naïveté but I believed people wanted to change the world back then (while making money) and it was inspiring. Now I only believe people are in it for money, which is the opposite of inspiring
• whiplash451 2y ago
  Point 5: even if your startup exits successfully, the math of exits are brutal for employees (even early ones). Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios. Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.
  • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    This is why later companies can be better. Either they are public or private but it is clearer what the stock is and could be worth. Best deal is to get actual stock not stock options.
  • YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    I don't know anyone who took any significant pay cut for the expectation of future return. If you join startup for huge return as an employee in any case you are doing it wrong.
    • whiplash451 2y ago
      Expectations of a big return is absolutely a valid reason to join a startup. That’s the very definition of it actually.
      • YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        No, that's why you have such expectation mismatch. No one should take any significant pay cut over market rate. In that way they aren't losing anything monetary.
• qwertox 2y ago
  > This shift isn't isolated to these two posts. Is there a statistical analysis which backs this claim?
  • paulnpace 2y ago
    Going back a little further, perhaps 20 years or so, there was generally less focus on "hard" data. I wonder if the ability to perform qualitative analyses plays into how an online community evolves?
• that_guy_iain 2y ago
  Is it also that many of HN's audience have gotten older and tried these things? I'm currently working on building my own startup in the billing industry which has a massive barrier to entry just on functionality and then marketing spend and whatnot. If I was in my 20s all this work wouldn't be that much of a big deal. In my 30s it's rougher. And in 40s it would be even rougher. That's not to mention other issues like funding becoming harder to get.
• deleted 2y ago
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• qrsjutsu 2y ago
  (new) Data Sources and methods of collection have been maxed out, or rather, reached a plateau or, to be radically honest, the homogeneity of founders / techies / researchers has reached an unhealthy maximum / imbalance, which happened because VC and the financial culture in general is ... well, a bit too IQy, ... it's a bit like psychology that, despite being true and insanely valuable, is bad for crowd control, to put it in slightly conspiratorial ( cooperative portfolio ) terms. and there's of course the issue of the variety of engineers they grew and research fields they expanded. the narrowing of the playing field, in general. but hey, let's read some PG article that distracts us with fake honey & not really milk, produced in shlobbering portfolio communist environments that spread back doors into teen minds to use perverted live telemetry to build poofy, roofie-craving consumers
• aziaziazi 2y ago
  As an ex-engineer in I relate very much with : > 3. The VC model's limitations have become apparent. The focus on hypergrowth and exits has left many founders [[engineers]] feeling trapped between authentic business building and investor [[founders]] expectations. Damn me! I’ve be naive to trust the (marketing) promise of the last startup I worked for, as an authentic promise from the founders. A few weeks into and I understood the real goal was to grow and get market shares, whatever the means. I felt betrayed but stayed because I liked my peer and the day to day job, and economic insecurity feeling. Fast forward 2 years: burnout and quit. Probably some of the 3 founders did kind of trust in the marketing promise at first and after so many speechs and work they confirmed it via some IKEA effect and confirmation bias [0]. But I felt we were actually building fancy CRUDs (forbidden idea there!) not disturbing anything at all. 0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
• deleted 2y ago
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• bilinguliar 2y ago
  I value my own business for freedom, not money. You don’t have to build a unicorn. Business has to be sustainable; profit has to be higher than expenses.
  • nostradumbasp 2y ago
    I think this is the key to work-life happiness. Wishing you the best. Hopefully I am doing the same someday.
• hequmania 2y ago
  Enterpreneurship is much more than just running a startup. You can build a product by bootstrapping it and start selling. You don't need to go all in from the very beginning, but you can build and try selling that. If it ever sticks, then you can go all in. Also, you don't need to come up with something totally new that has never existed before. You can also build something that is already proven to have use for. Much easier to sell a little better or a little cheaper product to markets that exists instead of trying to create markets for something no-one has ever used before.
  • tiborsaas 2y ago
    > to markets that exists instead of trying to create markets for something no-one has ever used before Tried this quite a few times to know that competition is a good thing to have. The screen is a blank canvas, but the real world isn't.
• heisenbit 2y ago
  A lot in tech is driven by technological hardware progress: Cpu‘s faster, storage faster and bigger, network pipes thicker and more ubiquitous, power requirements lower. This progress has slowed down in the past decades creating fewer opportunities to put incremental innovation on a self rising pedestal. Today‘s hyperconnected and more centralized global economy makes it even harder - there are fewer markets and medium to large sized buyers. AI has some advantages still on the scaling and basic hardware optimization side but even there it seems hard to monetize reliably innovation.
• simultsop 2y ago
  In my opinion it is decentralized startup spring rather. Just because all do not go mainstream and some can't notice, it does not mean they do not exist. Next 20 years there'll be thousands tiktoks potentially.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  Additionally, when the product is software based, the typical reaction is to post open source alternatives, because naturally any weekend project will do as alternative.
• kamikazeturtles 2y ago
  I don't think this is so much a "shift in culture" more than a generation getting older. Most Millennials are in their 30s now. I shouldn't be speaking for you guys because I'm genZ... but it's probably to do with the new responsibilities and the increased risk aversion that comes with them.
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  I think HN lost its audience of the commoners and gained a audience of billionaire for billonaire products - and billionaire related prodcuts that are services to milk the comoners. Add to that, that every tech advance gives birth to horrible destructive potential that is realized- you have growing despair.
• willtemperley 2y ago
  Just need to move to a country where 30k USD is a good salary. Build the same stuff for far less.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I wonder about this, while living and working in SF gives you the networking opportunities, surely building a pure tech company can be done from anywhere? Cost of living is vastly different even inside the US, moreso in the EU, and a digital nomad can live and work from anywhere.
• deleted 2y ago
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• ForHackernews 2y ago
  I mean, in the second example there's not even any hypothetical: It factually WAS better for him working at Google and getting rich that way than any of his startups. There's optimism and there's denying historical reality.
• ellis0n 2y ago
  I've been on HN since 2012 and have long been disappointed by what startups represent now. At the beginning, I thought startups were about technology, innovation and improving people's lives worldwide. But no, startups are about money, money and only money. No one cares about technology, the tech needed for PR and innovation is just for patents. Innovation ideas and technology can be bought by rich guys. Now it feels like a jar of spiders where a good idea is copied faster than it gets funding. It’s time to say that cleverness has beaten brains and we’re entering an era of copy-paste. As a result, the best innovations are lost. For example, over the last 10 years I invested in the best development environment for programmers, but no one else showed interest due to the weak marketing effect of signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah! marketing is above technology because no one will even hear about you and prices on big screens have skyrocketed. You need a Unicorn of $ to get shown to everyone. Gold nugget companies, where there is a balance of technology, money and non-tech are very rare.
• Chyzwar 2y ago
  I think this is the normal trajectory of online forum. The initial cohort was positive and deeply invested into the topic. Over time, this initial cohort gets older and start to have life, slowly being replaced by new people. As long new people share initial ideas and archetype, it can continue to work well. For HN case, initial cohort either become too busy with life and success and left forum or become jaded and skeptical about startups by experiencing it by themselves. The second group is still very active here, driving a lot of sentiment in discussion. HN also changed audience to be more general techy forum that startup forum. There are more people that want to discuss politics instead of technology (see deepseek, UK hardware talent to AMA with Peter Roberts). Any post about hiring is full of people whining about leetscode. Posts about process are full of agile haters. Even product lunches are full of open-source zealots, discussion of unrelated stuff like rust or useless feedback about website working slowing on 10 years old android phone with JS disabled. There is very little content for aspiring founders. Finally, there is value in HN for discovery, just not for startup. You can learn more about startup/VC from Y Combinator YouTube channel, Saastr or even Harry Stebbings podcast.
• shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
  Coming here after reading the second linked story in this article unexpected (and read this too) just before writing this thought, a new definition of startup is badly needed. The reason is that in the second story, half of the startups were mere ideas and were never executed/launched in the first place. Furthermore, according to statistics, 1 out of 10 startups succeed on average or 90% startups fail within the first 10 years of launch. So, we can say that startup is actually a winter game from the beginning.
• gtzi 2y ago
  Often much of such 'change' in similar considerations comes from yourself – you are older, maybe more risk averse, and hence much more biased in your assessment of the landscape.
• robertclaus 2y ago
  My impression is that the disillusionment with startups has led to m a gradual shift towards small self sufficient software businesses. Some folks that would have previously started a VC backed startup for casual software ideas now just keep the scale down and supplement their income on the side.
• leeter 2y ago
  I think a lot of very accurate reasons have been covered by others. These are my key points: * COL in most areas has skyrocketed, housing and healthcare have both ballooned in cost massively. This has meant I'm much less likely to take risks that would put either of these at risk. * My ideas aren't unique. I'm 99.9995% sure that the ideas I have floating around in my head for a startup are already covered by someone much more capable than I to execute them. Given that the main reason startups fail is a lack of market, and I'm definitely not the sort of person that can just make a market appear overnight... Yeah definitely not feeling like taking a risk on something likely either already served or which needs someone who can communicate to prospective customers why such a market should exist. * I'm not interested in cashing out. My goal if I'm growing a business is to have something I enjoy and cherish. Not just to sell and cash out. (I say this now naively ) TLDR: The risk reward ratio in my estimation only favors the ultra wealthy, or unicorn engineers right now. I'm smart but I'm not that smart. My goal right now is to get enough money I can retire and work on projects I want to. If that means one of them becomes a startup, I'm good with that. But, I'm also not expecting to IPO or get VC backing if that happens.
• tlogan 2y ago
  I think several factors have changed over time, which have made the startup landscape—and for us mere mortals who dream about it—less exciting: - Massive consolidation in tech: Large tech companies can easily acquire and neutralize potential competitors by offering founders a few million dollars, leading to fewer truly groundbreaking success stories. - The evolving role of accelerators and VCs: They’ve turned startups into something akin to product management roles within their own agendas. Whether it’s cloud, AI, or the next big trend, founders often end up building what investors want rather than pursuing their own unique visions. - A lack of truly groundbreaking ideas: We don’t see as many revolutionary concepts anymore—the kind that once gave birth to companies like Google or Amazon. This is likely tied to the investor-driven focus mentioned above. - A shift in cultural expectations: Perhaps we—or at least the HN audience—are becoming more like Europe, with an increasing expectation that governments will take care of us, whether through healthcare or other social services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shift the mindset around risk and entrepreneurship.
• deleted 2y ago
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• osigurdson 2y ago
  >> When senior engineers can make $300K+ at established companies If your goal is to make a good salary at a stable company, I don't think a startup is a good choice. Doing a startup is like trying to become a rock star (though chances of success are probably 10X better).
• greenie_beans 2y ago
  buncha cookie cutter folks on here who feel safe with their high compensation while they sit at their standing desk and drink their hot green tea. then they pick up their child from private school and kiss their wife who secretly finds them incredibly boring.
  • greenie_beans 2y ago
    sorry this was snarky, still reeling from some guy telling me i'm wrong for trying to be an entrepreneur and instead i should just collect a big tech paycheck. both options are valid, only one is valid for me.
• d--b 2y ago
  There are like 20 new AI startups every day. Makes for a warm winter
• ternnoburn 2y ago
  I think more people are realizing that the stories of startup success in 2013 were heavy on survivorship bias, and that over the past decade people have become aware of just how predatory and unequal the VC model is. New founders have less wool over their eyes, and increasingly run the numbers and say, "wait a second, that's the expected success rate? That's the pressure I'll have to grow grow grow? Those are the terms? Nah, I can work 40 somewhere, get paid more, and put in fewer hours." We've stopped romanticizing killing oneself for the hustle too.
• escapecharacter 2y ago
  DON'T DO IT should be the generic advice to anyone wanting to found/join a startup. You should only engage with startups if you have a good reason to. Just like you should only become a SoundCloud rapper if you fundamentally enjoy that life on a day-to-day basis, not because your goal is to throw champagne parties on yachts because you think all rappers get to do that as a payoff for the grind. I’ve worked for 10 startups, 3 with successful exits, but only 1 of which made me a tangible financial boost; in true startup fashion this last success has more than paid for the rest. 2 of these startups were bootstrapped with cofounders that I later had a falling out with. This was a deeply horrible experience, at a time when I had no financial safety net. This made my self-esteem during key strategic decisions disorienting low. I had peers also founding startups during this time I was regularly in touch with, and they managed to be so much more level-headed than me, while I kept taking crazy risks or being too risk-averse. Years later, I realized most of the the "peer" cofounders I was comparing myself to had generational wealth. To them, founding a startup was more like a gap year. This was the roughest period of my life, and I actually have more spotty memory of this time than before or afterwards; literal brain damage. I’ve ended up in startups so often because they enable you to tackle interesting problems holistically. I’m happier and more useful in this mode of work, rather than at an established company where you end up having to use existing, out-of-date models in team roles that are relatively silo'd. As an early startup employee, you can get an incredible amount of latitude you wouldn't otherwise. Founders should be leaning into this as part of the employment offer - you can't pay as much as a big company, but if your employee wants every Wednesday off because they do a weekly silent yoga retreat, you can say yes to that, while a big company wouldn't. The worst times I've had working for founders are when: 1. They treat the startup like their baby, and try to micromanage it like it's still only 2-3 people when the team has grown to a few dozen. 2. They think of the startup like it's their gap year, and don't actually care about product success. They want to continue with their original on-a-pedestal hypothesis for 2-3 years without attempting pivoting into potential traction. They run out of investor's money, and then get upper-level management jobs at large companies. I'm not offended at the waste of VC money, but rather the waste of human effort; we could have potentially found user value. If we aren't going to do aggressively pursue that, at least let me mess around with my own nonsense instead of insisting I stick to the product roadmap we all know isn't going to go anywhere useful. Our primary model for creating new value is VC-backed startups, where the payoff is huge if you win, but unsustainable and demoralizing for anything else. This incentivizes startups and their investors to shoot for the moon and miss rather than seek lifestyle businesses which could have been a great contribution to the infrastructure of society. I wish the other R&D models got more attention: think tanks, government grant-based orgs, etc. I've done R&D work in academia, but I've found unfortunately that people are so ephemeral, so while most of the work is intelligent, it's quality is fragile and isn't reusable engineering. One exception would be some of the university-backed open data institutions https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/us-state-level-conservation-data-summaries/ https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/us-state-level-conservati... All that being said, I am currently bootstrapping a startup now! This time, I have a long personal runway, and I am quite happy. I am working with 1 part-time contractor, and at the stage where I'm discussing a raise with a few angels to hire a full-time team. However, if this raise doesn't work out, the path forward for the next ~2 years is the same, just more gradual.
• dfaiv 2y ago
  good riddance
• emtel 2y ago
  HN has become a very conservative forum (in the temperamental, not political sense). There is far more skepticism of new technologies in the comments, and a much stronger status quo bias than there used to be. But I think this is more reflective of a shift in the makeup of HN commenters than of society as a whole. The people I work with today don’t seem any different, on average, than the people I worked with 20 years ago.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  I think it should be noted that a lot of people do startups for reasons other than money. I was recently down in SF for an interview at a YC startup and later in the day, the two founders shared with me their salaries at their previous jobs. One was making 900k a year and the other was making 450k a year, but they ultimately decided to leave their big tech jobs to start their startup.
• _fat_santa 2y ago
  You have to be crazy to start a startup, and I mean this in a good way. I'm currently working on a startup, completely bootstrapped and taking no VC funds. I know what my odds are and I know that the company will most likely fail, but I still do it. That's what makes startup founders "crazy", because you have to realize how low your odds are and at the same time say "fuck it" and keep going. IMO there will always be startup founders because there will always be folks that want to scratch that itch.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    And that's fair, that's how all the big tech companies of today were founded. But only people who are in an already comfortable position that they can take the risk can do that, which requires either financial support, still living at home, having passive income to live off of, etc. And even if you have all that, I believe you need to be a special and rare type of person to have an idea and have the self-motivation, energy, discipline, and optimism to bring it to life.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  > The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find. I sort of disagree with this. While clearly the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked, I still see a ton of good ideas! This might come off as rude, but if you’re the type of person who follows the standard track of graduate with a cs degree then work at big tech for 5 years with your main hobby being socializing or working out, then yeah good ideas will hard to come up with. For those of us interested in tech but with highly non-linear career paths, startup ideas basically fall out of the sky.
• jschveibinz 2y ago
  Here are a few anecdotes from the U.S. that can hopefully add substance to this conversation: 1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself. 2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what AI will likely disrupt in the next few years. So, think about solving problems in the physical world. 3) Many startups create a pool of equity at around 10-15% of total shares for awarding to key employees. If your startup doesn't have this, then that is a red flag. 4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution? 5) startups are still thriving at universities that support entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. 6) financial stability of startups, especially technical startups, is greatly affected by non-dilutive grants and contracts, e.g. SBIR awards. Investors look for this.
  • gnkyfrg 2y ago
    [dead]
  • fxtentacle 2y ago
    My bet would be on material science to become the new software. Thanks to 3D printing, we now have lots of ideas of things that people would like to make. So the demand is there and quantifiable. But we lack the technology to produce it.
  • aworks 2y ago
    4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution? --- I've worked at three start-ups. The answer was yes to the first question for all three. But the second question was really hard to answer going in. In hindsight, only of the companies had a valued solution. And I left 9 years before IBM bought them for big money. I had a lot of fun and excitement but the financial uncertainty is tough.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  A lot of the comments here boil down to "FAANG" is a better deal. But lots of people literally want FAANG to go extinct and won't work for them. Which means you work where? Startup pay usually beats what random business pay for SWE work. Probably there's some kind of third track, but it's less obvious to me.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Speaking for myself (and this will likely show up on their application audits making me an infeasible), I'd give up some of my morals if the pay is good. A former colleague somehow landed a job at Github, he earns more than most management level people here; he said the job is just a job and pretty much the same as any other job, but he can't really leave because the pay is so good.
• tptacek 2y ago
  People have been campaigning for other people to avoid startups and just take jobs at big companies for the entire time I've been here.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  That’s because of audiences changing. This isn’t a startup forum. It’s /r/technology+programming I’ve seen numerous Eternal Septembers. Each culture thinks they won’t have it and unless they’re a pay-for service they will.
• cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Startups have been on average a shit deal for a long time. I liken it to writing a book - best not to do it unless there is a book inside of you and you'll die if you don't get it out. I worked in Big Tech before doing consulting at some startups and it appeared to me that startups were often these cultish tribes where the willingness to accept a small percentage of equity was a strong signal that the employee really did believe the future of the company. They don't really want people around with realistic expectations as it'll hurt moral and the illusion that they have to keep going as they raise for subsequent rounds.
• zer0tonin 2y ago
  For me, I think one of the biggest issue is how incredibly boring the startup landscape has become. Who here is seriously passionate about doing SaaS #9001 which will contain a chatgpt wrapper and yet another series of buzzword to attract VC funding instead of actual users? There's a ton of big, real problems with our world at the moment, and I don't see the startup scene attacking any of those.
  • snowstormsun 2y ago
    Very well said.
• gnkyfrg 2y ago
  [dead]
• crackercrews 2y ago
  Much of this is because ZIRP is gone. Getting OPM is harder when they have more options.
• jmward01 2y ago
  1 and 2 are right, 3 and 4 are dead wrong. There are massive opportunities out there and it isn't a problem focusing on hypergrowth and exits. It is however a problem that even when these massive growth and exits do happen the payout is usually not worth it for all but the founders and VCs. If you stay too long and the company does grow, but your salary doesn't keep up, and you decide to leave you now have to either abandon your options or buy them and pay taxes on an overinflated FMV (if I can't sell them then the FMV is 0 to me). You are now left with options that are, at best, worthless for a long time or most likely worthless forever. Meanwhile founders have gotten money from internal raises to keep them going and have some ability to make sure their shares have value when an exit happens. Staying means you watch year after year as your options continue to not be worth anything and your share of the company continues to be cut as rounds of funding happen all the while watching as people at a FANG are making 50% more than you. The only strategy that has a chance at any value is leaving early and leaving often or coming in very late to have a real salary and a chance at a minor boost on your options when an exit happens. If you are an early employee (20 or less, and your options are valued at ~0.10 or less) AND you think there is some chance the company will 'make it' then buy a few k of your options as soon as they vest and leave after 1-1.5 years to go to the next place. This avoids taxes on worthless options and gives you some shot at maybe having one give you some value back. If you are any later than that then don't buy your options and make sure you get a salary that is competitive and still leave after 2-3 years if the company hasn't made it. The options are probably going to be worthless but now you are using them to grow in ability and salary. Options as compensation is a lie and that is the core problem.
• lizknope 2y ago
  I've been here for a long time and I didn't even know that this site was for startups until a few years ago. I wonder how old the author is. I started working in 1997 at the height of the dot com boom. I knew people at multiple startups that got bought. People that were millionaires at age 25-30. I would get about 5 phone calls a week on my office phone from recruiters thinking I should leave. In 2001 I saw all the layoffs and we had a reorg. The job and coworkers I loved turned into something I hated. No recruiters, no openings, it took me 10 months to find something new. Since then I tried 2 startups and both were failures. In the first I don't regret it as my old job was not great. At the second I know that I made a mistake both professionally and financially. That was 5 years ago and if a recruiter contacts me for a startup I don't even reply. Not interested at all in the chaos and failed promises that was my startup experiences.
• godelski 2y ago
  > The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find. I'd like to add a point here. There's still lots of low hanging fruit. But so much of this is hard to implement in a way that won't be immediately replicated by a major player. So good luck displacing them.
• paulsutter 2y ago
  Everyone should follow what’s best for them. I love early stage, and venture/growth startups are exactly right for me. I can totally understand why folks like working at FANG and it’s wonderful that software engineers can get paid proper large salaries with that lifestyle. It wasn’t always true, Google was the pioneer. I took 5 years off to travel in 2013, and I’m starting a new company now without taking even a week off after Formlogic (my last startup) ran out of runway. Understand what’s best for you and follow it. Happy to discuss early stage entrepreneurship with anyone wrestling with the question
• edanm 2y ago
  I think the second point in the article is the main reason - compensation from Big Tech changes the financial equation considerably. There's still a lot of upsides to starting a startup (as well as plenty of downsides), but the financial upsides are lessened compared to working in tech, and the opportunity cost of giving up a Big Tech salary is huge.
• hintymad 2y ago
  I'd go with that the industry has changed and that the makeup of the HN users has changed. I'd venture to guess that a much larger percent of HN users back in 2013 were really into startups than merely tech news. What's really interesting is that the industry has changed. Back in 2013 or earlier, there were still many new scenarios. The mobile ecosystem was rapidly expanding, we probably tried new apps on a weekly basis if not daily. The cloud was still relatively new and many companies were either trying to figure out how to use cloud or leverge cloud. The enterprise world was getting interesting too, many infrastructure systems were popping up left and right. There was this genuine vibe that our life and work could benefit from tech. Now I'm not so sure. It feels like many people are quite content with the life, and it is increasingly harder to see what changes we'd really desire. As a result, the optimism about startups has also abated.
• sirspacey 2y ago
  What changed is the audience Founders are in private group chats now Man I miss it being real here instead of Reddit Jr Grateful for those of you who still hang out
• kinnth 2y ago
  It's largely a measure of risk & reward for your time in 20s-30s. What would you rather as a bright, intelligent, driven person? Put your heart and soul into a high risk but genuinely interesting problem or get paid well to work on someone else's reasonably interesting problem. I personally had a startup, it was a consultancy business, we got to 5 employees and I learnt a lot. It was very low risk, $0 in VC and bootstrapped from an employee stock benefit of $20k. I focussed on me working just like my employees. I had fun doing it, paid myself well, learnt a lot. I am now financially stable, no debt and own a house outright. That was always enough for my dreams. I think before jumping in two feet first, lower your life risk. Aim for your 40s to be your own, where you can travel and live free.
• eichi 2y ago
  This kind of conversations give me a cofidence, so thanks.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• rglover 2y ago
  > The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find. This is only true if you're prioritizing novelty, but a gift has been given to new startups/founders: most of the once-innovative companies have either disappeared or have plateaued and are trapped in stagnation/corporate muck. Nearly all of the startups/companies I used to adore have embraced some version of Fortune 500 mediocrity. Now, I think the "innovation" is taking ideas that already exist and dialing them back to what they were before all of the money, press, and massive headcounts. Products designed for the user, not for the investor or social status. I always come back to this quote by John D. Rockefeller (which I think is dead-on): "the secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well." Just look for the things that are common but have a lackluster experience. There's an overwhelming amount of products fitting that category nowadays. Innovation doesn't have to mean something "new." For example, Linear's [1] big innovation was taking issue tracking and giving it a polished UI/UX. And guess what? People love it/are buying it. [1] https://linear.app https://linear.app