3 ms·

A product which provided actual value and novel functionality to end users has been swallowed up by a larger corporation with maybe a 25% chance of actually get

by jarcane 12y ago

A product which provided actual value and novel functionality to end users has been swallowed up by a larger corporation with maybe a 25% chance of actually getting any kind of continued life, if this plays out as these things usually do. And once again, this is pitched as winning the trophy, because the culture has become more obsessed with collecting a payoff than actual long-term growth and innovation. In the 1990's when Creative Labs bought out and shuttered Aureal and basically killed 3D audio in its crib, it was a fucking travesty that audio buffs still mourn to this day. If that'd happened now, in 2015's "startup culture," we'd be expected to cheer that they got theirs.

nedwin 12y ago
"Provided actual value" but unfortunately couldn't extract enough value from their users to survive independently. The choice was likely between shutting down and going on unemployment or finding a soft landing.
- markemer 12y ago
  Yeah. And it seems like a natural fit for DropBox. I'd love this service on my dropbox. And I had never heard of it before. Dropbox is looking for ways to stay competitive with the likes of Google, etc, and I'm amazed at how well they are doing.
jscheel 12y ago
To be fair, if anyone could keep this technology alive, it would be Dropbox.
patio11 12y ago
In an alternate universe, this genre would sound like: "We produced a great product which costs $60k a month to run but which only charges customers $8k. We hope you have enjoyed being subsidized by our investors and below-market salaries, but there is simply no more subsidy left. We received an offer of a soft landing, which means the team is taken care of and the founders get a consolation prize which doesn't quite make up for spurning the BigCo offers they turned down to get here. We took it. Please tell uninvolved third parties who have never even heard of us before to mock us on the Internet, as is customary in these sorts of situations." We do not ask people to actually write that because to do so would be petty, cruel, and beneath a community organized around people who make things.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  "We produced a product that was never, ever going to pay for itself in the hopes that it would convince a bigger company to give us all stable jobs and/or a truckload of cash so we could stop pretending that this boondoggle was sustainable. And it worked! We're so happy!" "Oh, you...you used the product? Wow. Sucks to be you." Any time you hear a startup guy talking about their "exit strategy," understand that this is what they mean.
  - patio11 12y ago
    This view is quite popular on HN. It is false. Substantially nobody starts a startup with the idea that they will get bought out by $NAME_AN_ACQUIRER. This is a sucky and very stressful way to buy yourself a job interview at the cost of two years of your life. There's a much, much easier way to get a job interview with, without loss of generality, Dropbox: ask for one. If you're a designer with sufficient chops to get a prototype funded by YC, you can have a job at Dropbox by Friday. (Step 1: identity any design lead at Dropbox. Step 2: coffee date. Step 3: interview. Step 3 may even be optional, depending how good you were at steps 1 and 2.) It's the hottest hiring market in the Valley in the history of ever. Many people have a poor understanding of the rough economics of selling a company in a soft landing vs. taking a hiring bonus from AmaGooFaceSoft. The hiring bonus is substantially more lucrative, particularly for non-founding employees, when you amortize it over the time (and opportunity cost) required to achieve it. I appreciate that it is frustrating if someone pays $19 a month loyally and then finds one day that $19 doesn't suffice to field a team of five engineers and designers continue to work on producing them bespoke software development. The source of frustration is not "unsustainable models" or "evil VC funding" -- it is, simply, that $19 doesn't buy that caliber of software development unless it's being paid by, oh, +/- 4,000 people in parallel. There exist options if one desires continuity of service in a SaaS app. They require custom legal language and start at $10k. If you don't remember signing custom legal language and you denominate your SaaS spend in dollars or tens of dollars, you haven't purchased continuity of service, even if you think you're entitled to it.
    - sireat 12y ago

by jarcane 12y ago

nedwin 12y ago

"Provided actual value" but unfortunately couldn't extract enough value from their users to survive independently. The choice was likely between shutting down and going on unemployment or finding a soft landing.

markemer 12y ago
Yeah. And it seems like a natural fit for DropBox. I'd love this service on my dropbox. And I had never heard of it before. Dropbox is looking for ways to stay competitive with the likes of Google, etc, and I'm amazed at how well they are doing.

jscheel 12y ago

To be fair, if anyone could keep this technology alive, it would be Dropbox.

patio11 12y ago

In an alternate universe, this genre would sound like: "We produced a great product which costs $60k a month to run but which only charges customers $8k. We hope you have enjoyed being subsidized by our investors and below-market salaries, but there is simply no more subsidy left. We received an offer of a soft landing, which means the team is taken care of and the founders get a consolation prize which doesn't quite make up for spurning the BigCo offers they turned down to get here. We took it. Please tell uninvolved third parties who have never even heard of us before to mock us on the Internet, as is customary in these sorts of situations." We do not ask people to actually write that because to do so would be petty, cruel, and beneath a community organized around people who make things.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago
"We produced a product that was never, ever going to pay for itself in the hopes that it would convince a bigger company to give us all stable jobs and/or a truckload of cash so we could stop pretending that this boondoggle was sustainable. And it worked! We're so happy!" "Oh, you...you used the product? Wow. Sucks to be you." Any time you hear a startup guy talking about their "exit strategy," understand that this is what they mean.
- patio11 12y ago
  This view is quite popular on HN. It is false. Substantially nobody starts a startup with the idea that they will get bought out by $NAME_AN_ACQUIRER. This is a sucky and very stressful way to buy yourself a job interview at the cost of two years of your life. There's a much, much easier way to get a job interview with, without loss of generality, Dropbox: ask for one. If you're a designer with sufficient chops to get a prototype funded by YC, you can have a job at Dropbox by Friday. (Step 1: identity any design lead at Dropbox. Step 2: coffee date. Step 3: interview. Step 3 may even be optional, depending how good you were at steps 1 and 2.) It's the hottest hiring market in the Valley in the history of ever. Many people have a poor understanding of the rough economics of selling a company in a soft landing vs. taking a hiring bonus from AmaGooFaceSoft. The hiring bonus is substantially more lucrative, particularly for non-founding employees, when you amortize it over the time (and opportunity cost) required to achieve it. I appreciate that it is frustrating if someone pays $19 a month loyally and then finds one day that $19 doesn't suffice to field a team of five engineers and designers continue to work on producing them bespoke software development. The source of frustration is not "unsustainable models" or "evil VC funding" -- it is, simply, that $19 doesn't buy that caliber of software development unless it's being paid by, oh, +/- 4,000 people in parallel. There exist options if one desires continuity of service in a SaaS app. They require custom legal language and start at $10k. If you don't remember signing custom legal language and you denominate your SaaS spend in dollars or tens of dollars, you haven't purchased continuity of service, even if you think you're entitled to it.
  - sireat 12y ago