10 ms·
We have developed an economy oriented around selling one another websites, and we are only belatedly noticing that none of our enemies seem to have followed.
by troad 1y ago
We have developed an economy oriented around selling one another websites, and we are only belatedly noticing that none of our enemies seem to have followed.
- bix6 1y agoIt’s ridiculous. It’s so easy to find VC funding for software but heaven forbid you try and make agricultural innovations. Biotech is slightly better but still a struggle. Hardware only counts right now if it’s defense tech but even then people would rather have another SaaS.
- makestuff 1y agoYeah seeing the innovations DJI is making in agriculture makes me wonder why VCs do not want to fund other startups like it. I know the margins are worse and it takes way more capital to fund hardware companies, but that has to be better than funding another chat-gpt wrapper. I guess that is why I am not a VC though lol.
- RealityVoid 1y agoThey're just hard. What is the US robotics startup that you would use as an example of success? iRobot? It barely broke even.
- raziel2701 1y agoHow is boston dynamics doing? They do very cool stuff but it feels like they struggle commercializing their technology. I remember they were once bought by google I think? And then spat out...
- evrimoztamur 1y agoSouth Korea got to it: https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/brand-journal/mobility-solution/hyundai-boston-dynamics https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/brand-journal/mobility-...
- pineaux 1y agoToo bad Hyundai is betting on hydrogen... Thats basically dead in the water.
- slavik81 1y agoThey also have battery electric cars. The Hyundai Ioniq and Kia EV vehicles are quite popular.
- conradev 1y agoIt was also the Korean automaker’s best July sales month since launching its first vehicle in 1986. The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids (HEVs). https://electrek.co/2025/08/01/hyundai-ioniq-5-shatters-us-sales-record-as-ev-push-heats-up/ https://electrek.co/2025/08/01/hyundai-ioniq-5-shatters-us-s...
- sofixa 1y agoHyundai is a massive conglomerate doing a ton of different things. Having a side bet on hydrogen isn't bad, especially considering it's potential potential in applications such as aviation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- snapcaster 1y agoAnduril?
- neural_thing 1y agoSkild, Physical Intelligence
- throwup238 1y agoThe infrastructure to rapidly iterate and manufacture just isn’t here anymore, so everything costs significantly more to the point where we’re noncompetitive. Even VCs with no experience see the top line numbers for hardware startups and nope out. Contrast this with biotech venture capital which has been doing well for decades, often investing more capital in a year than software VCs. The difference is that all the research, clinical trial, and manufacturing expertise is already here and concentrated in a few localities like South San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston.
- makestuff 1y agoYeah that makes a lot of sense. Way easier to iterate when you have access to a machine shop vs having to upload a CAD file and have a part shipped from another country.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThere isn't even anyone here competing with eg JLCPCB just for PCBs let alone all the other prototyping stuff. It makes sense, somehow China is able to do it for less than the materials cost. I think that's why most people just aren't that upset about tariffs. It would be nice to be able to participate in our own economy other than by grifting off real estate or software.
- Workaccount2 1y agoTo fund a software start-up you need 5 people and 5 laptops to get to tens of millions of value. To fund a similar sized hardware start-up you need a full lab andddd already the proposition is dead.
- runlaszlorun 1y agoYou're completely ignoring the vast amounts thrown into a marketing funnel in an attempt to acquire customers for their usually meh products. And engineering teams usually scale up with revenue as well. I feel like your numbers are the myth that gets told not what actually often happens
- hengheng 1y agoI've seen US startup people deal with manufacturing. There is a class gap that leaves no real space for skilled blue-collar work to exist and also be business critical, and fully integrated into the team. That is how a three-week turnaround for a milled prototype part ends up being tolerated.
- klooney 1y agoA16Z gets a lot of guff for their bad politics, but their "American dynamism" portfolio, if a little defense heavy, seems great
- bigyabai 1y agoYou forgot the most important thing about A16Z portfolios: they look great at the beginning of a bubble, and then... https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitz-went-all-in-on-crypto-at-the-worst-possible-time-11666769270 https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitz-went-all-in...
- baq 1y agoonly in software there's a clear, tried and tested multiple times path for 1000x ROI for an investor. thermodynamics themselves limit ROI for anything physical.
- kridsdale3 1y agoThermodynamics is also the limiter in AI these days.
- hattmall 1y agoNot necessarily the real limiter, right now, is finding a combination useful and profitable application. Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago>Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center. Exactly. Margins are dropping rapidly: https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats
- baq 1y ago...and to quote a classic, "your margin is my opportunity".
- baq 1y agoIt limits token generation, but not token utility.
- athrowaway3z 1y agoAI is two things. - The chatbot people have a personal attachment to - The processing tool. In the second, you only care about the result. Something like Claude Code can call any other provider if that's cheaper and visa-verse. Once I have the result, my dependency / lock-in is no more than a brand of toilet paper. The providers will have to do the 'capitalism thing' and compete. It's almost like WeWork's, valuated at IT levels by being in the style, only for investors to eventually figure out the marginal production costs are not reducible to near 0, and you can't just bully out competition / network-effect to get a monopoly. And this applies to any company that wraps and re-sells AI. Something the tech-VC world is so unfamiliar with, it's scrambling to present the truth of what is 'econ-101' for the rest of the world.
- nine_k 1y agoI'd say that VC funding may be an inappropriate tool for that. VCs want you to either grow fast, or fail fast. Not necessarily to bring profit fast, but to visibly capture the market (see Uber). Move fast, break things, rework things every week, trigger that wave of sign-ups. Agriculture is much slower, every iteration may be is a year, or (in tropical climates) half a year. Microelectronics is comparably slow, and even more unforgiving about making mistakes. Building robots does not scale ls easily as producing chips, let alone software. These areas need a different model of investment, with a longer horizon, slower growth, less influence of fads, better understanding of fundamentals. In some areas, DARPA provided such investment, with a good rate of success.
- bix6 1y agoIt shouldn’t be that way though. Venture capital is only for SaaS? It should be for technology in general. But the IRR demands are too much so it concentrates to SaaS.
- nine_k 1y agoVC capital is like a detonator. It seeks explosives, and when it finds them, produces spectacular fireworks that illuminate the entire industry, or even the entire world. It also ends up with a lot of duds, but it's OK by them. What VC capital is not interested in is regular fuel, which can burn steadily and expand gradually, without a shock wave. Such companies can be quite important. Say, GitHub was such a company for many years, before it took a large VC investment and got acquired MS. Investing in such companies requires much more diligence and foresight, maybe too much predictive power to work at mass scale. VCs' math only works because a single 1000x hit easily pays for a hundred of duds. If ROI per hit is 2-3x, and research required is 10x more deep, the prospects likely start to seem too bleak for folks with billions seeking return.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoPeople in this thread act like VC is the only way to raise capital. Ever heard of getting a business loan? Even a lot of companies in the Valley could probably get one more easily than they might think, if they're profitable. You don't have to give up equity either.
- monero-xmr 1y agoIt's about risk / reward, and patient capital. Within 10 years I am probably going to sell my SaaS business a very rich man, and I am going to self-fund a new company in hardware and / or manufacturing. America has made so many talented people wealthy very quickly over the past 2 decades, and as the low-hanging software fruit is ever-harder to find, the skilled entrepreneurs will look for new things do to, and more of us will get into hardware.
- sitkack 1y agoWe need regulation around how VCs work. They are in a house flipping game and nothing more, slapping on a bad kitchen remodel and then handing the hot potato onto the next sucker.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoWhy not just let it play out in their own arena? We already had the major unwind with the interest rate hikes. The tide went out and the players with their pants off were exposed for the most part. That said, allowing VC into 401ks and such I would agree is an abominable idea, because this stuff isn't marked properly until it is in distress. Actually, that area could use better regulation. Volatility laundering is already a systemic risk. Many of these vehicles have creative ways to not mark to their market value, which makes pension fund managers and leered participants happy because it greatly improves the perceived risk metrics and performance, at the equal expense of cloaked fragility. But perhaps just let them have a thunderdome, and if they want to breach the walls and enter areas like retirement funds where society agrees standard are higher, there is a strong set of filters/regulations that must be adhered to.
- sitkack 1y agoLetting them have their own thunderdome is regulation. It means they don't get to pee in our pool. I am all for a freemarket, but it needs to be kept in a cage match.
- lawlessone 1y agoSo many of the VC's doing the funding got rich of software and web stuff. They don't know anything else.
- Mistletoe 1y agoThey should plan more long term. In an economic downturn like after 2000, all these nonsense valuations for vaporware are going to go to the center of the earth. And all signs point to another downturn for the next decade. https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-reversion.php https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
- jojobas 1y agoVCs are happy to send a vast majority of their investments in search for billion-dollar company. There is no chance to get an agricultural startup to billion dollar valuation, agricultural innovations don't scale at a click of a button.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoI don't see any reason in principle why a $1B+ exit wouldn't be possible. This YCW18 ag company was acquired less than 3 years in by John Deere for $250M: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/john-deere-buys-autonomous-tractor-startup-bear-flag-robotics/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/john-deere-buys-autonomous...
- jojobas 1y agoSurely this company was 80%+ software.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoFully agree. I feel like anything relevantly practical is denied investment. But when it comes to anything flashy and hip, a train of dump trucks filled with cash couldn’t deliver money as quick as the VC dollars that flow into to startups with no business model and no hope of being profitable… Yeah, I get that startups should invest profits and not actually make profits for a while… But when they’re on their 4th round of funding with thousands of employees… shouldn’t they at least try to be a bit more financially responsible?
- camillomiller 1y agoBecause, despite all the belated narratives from a lot of people perusing this very website, Venture Capitalism is not a driver of innovation. It's an efficiency filter to supercharge capitalism and speed up the concentration of wealth into the pockets of the VCs themselves. Software is nimble, has less overhead, can be optimized for profit faster, can be recombined, pivoted, repurposed way faster. Ergo, the market economics of VC are terrible at naturally selecting for innovation with a societal benefit, because that’s absolutely not in their firmware.
- pyrale 1y agoProbably because the US let software be a breeding ground for monopolies. People invest there because they understand that's the best sector to, if the company works out, get unreasonable returns. As an example, the current AI valuations make no sense if the industry doesn't solidify around one or two companies. If you have money, the returns you'll get elsewhere are much less attractive, and can only be justified if they're very safe investments.
- otterley 1y agoLet’s not forget here that Chinese companies operate some of—if not the—most popular social networks in the world. WeChat and TikTok/Douyin are enormous. (Also, in neither country is the majority of its GDP comprised of websites.)
- nateglims 1y agoYes but the Chinese state is much more willing to direct capital to where it thinks it should go. The argument w.r.t. geopolitics is usually that the US is late to doing this and now lacks production capacity which is useful for competing.
- otterley 1y agoI think this is an "and," not a "but." Your statement and mine aren't in conflict.
- cylemons 1y agoThey may be the most popular but more importantly how profitable are they
- whimsicalism 1y agoWe have a massive and diversified economy - I suspect you are overgeneralizing from things adjacent to your niche in it.
- ulfw 1y agoWhat 'enemies'?
- baq 1y agohaven't been reading history much, have you?
- ulfw 1y agoI've read a lot of history, especially 1930s European history and see a ton of parallels to America in 2025. Is that the particular one you're referring to?
- nikbackm 1y agoGeopolitical rivals then if you prefer that.
- Henchman21 1y agoHow about those folks actively engaging in behavior that damages the US?
- olivierduval 1y agoIn that regard, US is obviously Europe's enemy, isn't it ? ;-) :-D
- Henchman21 1y agoCertainly they’re the enemy of this administration.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoWorth distinguishing between actively engaging in harmful behavior, and "failing to help". The Europeans have taken the US for granted for so long that when the US is only Ukraine's #1 donor country in absolute terms by far, their main response is to complain that even more help should be offered, and pretend the US is somehow hurting them. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s... Keep in mind that Ukraine is literally on the opposite side of the world from us. What's Brazil doing for Ukraine? What's Australia doing? As an American, I consistently argue that the US should not ally with Europe here on HN. But even I don't argue in favor of actively working to harm Europe. I just think we should cut Europe loose, because nothing we do for Europe will ever be enough, and Europe is a wealthy region that's plenty capable of providing for itself. And before you say anything about tariffs (which are paid by US companies btw), read this article: https://archive.is/MxUAa https://archive.is/MxUAa See also https://archive.is/WQQ45 https://archive.is/WQQ45
- Aurornis 1y agoThe countries producing semiconductors and manufacturing other goods are also producing SaaS services. It's not unique to the United States. The number of countries producing leading edge semiconductors is actually small. The number of companies doing this work is very small, too. Although much of the economy needs chips to operate, those leading chips are concentrated in the production of a very small number of companies.
- supportengineer 1y agoThese ads ain't gonna show themselves.
- monster_truck 1y agoI'm p convinced that this push for age verification using govt IDs & debit/cc tx is the death rattle of the rampant ad fraud that has sustained the tech bubble