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So, the opportunity to swindle investors, the Market for Lemon Startups that created the dotcom bubble is gone. How is that a bad thing? Assuming, of course, th

So, the opportunity to swindle investors, the Market for Lemon Startups that created the dotcom bubble is gone. How is that a bad thing? Assuming, of course, that you are trying to infuse capital into a real business and not run a Ponzi scheme. Intuitively, a deal in which investors have reduced risk should have more favorable terms for the founders, too, since investors don't have to discount for the risk of the business becoming another gigantic flop. Maybe you are losing the extremely remote possibility to become a billionaire and leave a trail of very disgruntled millionaires behind you, but that sounds like a good trade-off for me. EDIT: I've read the three parts. What I took from them is that, as creating a startup becomes a "science" that you can learn at school instead of an "art", entrepreneurs become something close to outsourced product managers, and frankly, I still don't see the problem.

vinceguidry 13y ago
Why take all the risk of designing, building, and marketing a product if all it gets you is a mediocre dead-end job in a big company? Entrepreneurship used to be where the brightest could make fortunes, now that ship as all but sailed. It might not bother you, but it should. All that talent is now going to seek opportunity elsewhere, rather than building useful products and services. Is this a good outcome for society?
- rubinelli 13y ago
  Here's the thing: you can always take the risk of building a product in the frontier. But the web is no longer the frontier. You can estimate the size of your market in two weeks, spending a few thousand dollars. You don't have to build a product from scratch; in fact, you could build a whole webapp running on S3 and connecting to pluggable services. Is this a waste of our best and brightest? Frankly, I don't know. But how many brilliant, young entrepreneurs got burned out after a catastrophic failure in the old model and never recovered?

vinceguidry 13y ago

Why take all the risk of designing, building, and marketing a product if all it gets you is a mediocre dead-end job in a big company? Entrepreneurship used to be where the brightest could make fortunes, now that ship as all but sailed. It might not bother you, but it should. All that talent is now going to seek opportunity elsewhere, rather than building useful products and services. Is this a good outcome for society?

rubinelli 13y ago
Here's the thing: you can always take the risk of building a product in the frontier. But the web is no longer the frontier. You can estimate the size of your market in two weeks, spending a few thousand dollars. You don't have to build a product from scratch; in fact, you could build a whole webapp running on S3 and connecting to pluggable services. Is this a waste of our best and brightest? Frankly, I don't know. But how many brilliant, young entrepreneurs got burned out after a catastrophic failure in the old model and never recovered?