5 ms·

Apologies if it was taken that way. FWIW The vidly website looks cool. I just can't see why people will switch from youtube. I simply can't fathom how this can

by axod 17y ago

Apologies if it was taken that way. FWIW The vidly website looks cool. I just can't see why people will switch from youtube. I simply can't fathom how this can end in a good way: startup = {name:"twitter"}; while(true) { if (startup.isHyped()) { startup.getMoreFunding(); // People invest in things that have hype // Others see it as good idea to build something based on it! var newStartup = {feature:["search","share video","share numbers","twitter porn","twitter lolcats"]}; // newStartup implements the feature // Child hypes up the parent some more startup.hype += newStartup.hype; startup.acquire(newStartup); // When you're 100% reliant on the parent, where else can you go :/ } } I just can't see how the loop can end with anything other than an OutOfFundingException. I certainly wasn't trying to insult Vidly, more try and understand the rationale for such a startup existing. As I say, if it's facebook, being able to share video is just an extra feature they add. Like 'search' and handling urls properly. Why so different for twitter? Why must there be a startup dedicated to searching tweets, that twitter acquire? Can't they search their own data? Why does another company need to do url shortening? As an exit, surely if you build on something else, you really limit your chances of being acquired to that parent. And if the parent is just funded by investors and not revenue... :/ Just seems flakey to me. Do you think vidly can be profitable? Isn't it pretty risky building on twitter? What if twitter blow up? Do you expect any other potential exit other than twitter acquiring them with their own funding?

chrysb 17y ago
See my comment below regarding narrow vision.
netcan 17y ago
I certainly wasn't trying to insult Vidly, more try and understand the rationale for such a startup existing. Here are some possible rationalisations for such companies existing, such companies betting on acquisition by a limited number of buyers & other concerns: - Smaller companies can sometimes do things better. - Smaller companies can sometimes do things cheaper. - Small companies can fail, so they can try riskier things. - Small companies may not have as much of a brand to protect, so they can try riskier things. - More features can be put to market test by multiple indipendant companies then by the 'parent' alone. Individual features can be put to market test and good ones have a better chance of being discovered. - Features can be tried multiple times by multiple companies, with the best one ultimately emerging. - Startups (using a certain definition) have a 1/x chance of succeeding at launch. Success/failure is binary. The risk of faling completely is extremely high. Therefore, a 10% or 20 or 40% chance that Twitter will disappear while they rely on it to survive is not as scary as it is for an established company. If your chances of success are only 1/5 anyway, going to 1/6 is not too bad. Basically, startups are structured to handle that sort of risk. These reasons may or may not add up to a net efficiency gain overall, better features or whatever. Redefining what companies do themselves vs what they outsource is an interesting part of how economies evolve. Outsourcing innovation (even if it is just a small feature) might be a good move, sometimes. The market gets to decide.
- axod 17y ago
  But twitter itself is a small startup :/
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    A small startup worth $1 billion. They laughed when Facebook was valued at that too.
  - netcan 17y ago
    Not really. First, small is relative. If 'company' is 3 guys working on a project for a couple of years, maybe they can be bought out at a price that Twitter can afford. Second, twitter is a big deal. That means it probably has the potential to be a big company. You may disagree and that is fine. But other people consider Twitter big.
  - whopa 17y ago
    That's the weird part. Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse. In contrast, Facebook has over 10x the people, and 10x the user base, but does major UI shakeups regularly, tries out new features often, and isn't afraid to tweak or remove them if they don't work out. They also are doing interesting things technically (e.g, Cassandra, Scribe) and open sourcing them, some of which Twitter deploys themselves (e.g., well, Cassandra, Scribe). Facebook definitely seems to fit the startup ideal much more than Twitter, yet Twitter is much smaller. What gives?
    - wensing 17y ago
      Startups should be very risk averse. One misstep can mean death. Remember, being bold when you recognize a valid opportunity is not the same thing as taking on risk. Risk comes from the unknown. As such, you aren't really rewarded in proportion to the risk you take (the amount of unknown territory you dive into)--you're rewarded in proportion to the market opportunity you nail. Rushing into things headlong is overrated. In that light, it makes sense to me that Facebook can afford to take more risks that twitter. And Microsoft can afford to take more risks than Facebook, etc.
pg 17y ago
Vidly is building on Twitter in the same way Micro-soft (as it was then called) was building on the Altair. So sure, Vidly could IPO. Their path from here to there would be as tortuous as Microsoft's, but all the best companies are transformed as they grow. All you need initially is a starting point, to engage with users. You are in effect framing the question as "could Vidly, without writing another line of code, have a successful outcome?" Probably not, but that's not the question that matters. The question that matters is "could Vidly, starting from this point, have a successful outcome?" The answer to that is, of course they could; any point where you've made something people want is probably good enough, barring certain pathological exceptions. When you and the TechCrunch trolls make fun of startups launching their initial version, you're like someone making fun of Dell when it was just Michael Dell assembling computers, or Microsoft when it was just a pair of undergrads writing a Basic interpreter. How could such companies possibly grow huge?
- jawngee 17y ago
  What an epic stretch. Altair had a business model, they sold something of value for money. Microsoft sold something for money. Neither twitter nor vidly sell anything for money and both will be struggling with monetization schemes for some time to come. Furthermore, the simplicity of what they do will be cloned and aped in months if not weeks, leaving them scrambling to add value, thus complicating their offering, effectively killing what little value they have now. The other problem here is that there are heavy brands that already exist that can sink the whole ship if they chose to, creating a mountain of Everest proportions for Vidly to climb. Look at how many URL shortening services exist today. Simple ideas get cloned quickly, then eventually open sourced, shorting the original business to offering infrastructure over product. Unfortunately the infrastructure for Vidly is dumb simple. Give me an account an encoding.com and twitter library and what more do I really need? And before anyone goes off on the famous I could build that in a week, keep in mind I built massify.com's self-scaling cloud-based HD video encoding solution in about a month, so I know what I'm talking about.
  - pg 17y ago
    It's always what you call an "epic stretch" for any company to make it from startup to IPO. By the time they IPOed, Microsoft was so huge, and so different from what they started with, that it's irrelevant what sort of business model they had when they were a couple undergrads writing an interpreter for MITS. Why don't you cut these guys a break? They've just launched. When I recently wrote If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch. I was thinking of TechCrunch. I'm embarrassed for HN to find this attitude here.
volida 17y ago
Twitter blow up?

by axod 17y ago

chrysb 17y ago

See my comment below regarding narrow vision.

netcan 17y ago

I certainly wasn't trying to insult Vidly, more try and understand the rationale for such a startup existing. Here are some possible rationalisations for such companies existing, such companies betting on acquisition by a limited number of buyers & other concerns: - Smaller companies can sometimes do things better. - Smaller companies can sometimes do things cheaper. - Small companies can fail, so they can try riskier things. - Small companies may not have as much of a brand to protect, so they can try riskier things. - More features can be put to market test by multiple indipendant companies then by the 'parent' alone. Individual features can be put to market test and good ones have a better chance of being discovered. - Features can be tried multiple times by multiple companies, with the best one ultimately emerging. - Startups (using a certain definition) have a 1/x chance of succeeding at launch. Success/failure is binary. The risk of faling completely is extremely high. Therefore, a 10% or 20 or 40% chance that Twitter will disappear while they rely on it to survive is not as scary as it is for an established company. If your chances of success are only 1/5 anyway, going to 1/6 is not too bad. Basically, startups are structured to handle that sort of risk. These reasons may or may not add up to a net efficiency gain overall, better features or whatever. Redefining what companies do themselves vs what they outsource is an interesting part of how economies evolve. Outsourcing innovation (even if it is just a small feature) might be a good move, sometimes. The market gets to decide.

axod 17y ago
But twitter itself is a small startup :/
- rantfoil 17y ago
  A small startup worth $1 billion. They laughed when Facebook was valued at that too.
- netcan 17y ago
  Not really. First, small is relative. If 'company' is 3 guys working on a project for a couple of years, maybe they can be bought out at a price that Twitter can afford. Second, twitter is a big deal. That means it probably has the potential to be a big company. You may disagree and that is fine. But other people consider Twitter big.
- whopa 17y ago
  That's the weird part. Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse. In contrast, Facebook has over 10x the people, and 10x the user base, but does major UI shakeups regularly, tries out new features often, and isn't afraid to tweak or remove them if they don't work out. They also are doing interesting things technically (e.g, Cassandra, Scribe) and open sourcing them, some of which Twitter deploys themselves (e.g., well, Cassandra, Scribe). Facebook definitely seems to fit the startup ideal much more than Twitter, yet Twitter is much smaller. What gives?
  - wensing 17y ago
    Startups should be very risk averse. One misstep can mean death. Remember, being bold when you recognize a valid opportunity is not the same thing as taking on risk. Risk comes from the unknown. As such, you aren't really rewarded in proportion to the risk you take (the amount of unknown territory you dive into)--you're rewarded in proportion to the market opportunity you nail. Rushing into things headlong is overrated. In that light, it makes sense to me that Facebook can afford to take more risks that twitter. And Microsoft can afford to take more risks than Facebook, etc.

pg 17y ago

Vidly is building on Twitter in the same way Micro-soft (as it was then called) was building on the Altair. So sure, Vidly could IPO. Their path from here to there would be as tortuous as Microsoft's, but all the best companies are transformed as they grow. All you need initially is a starting point, to engage with users. You are in effect framing the question as "could Vidly, without writing another line of code, have a successful outcome?" Probably not, but that's not the question that matters. The question that matters is "could Vidly, starting from this point, have a successful outcome?" The answer to that is, of course they could; any point where you've made something people want is probably good enough, barring certain pathological exceptions. When you and the TechCrunch trolls make fun of startups launching their initial version, you're like someone making fun of Dell when it was just Michael Dell assembling computers, or Microsoft when it was just a pair of undergrads writing a Basic interpreter. How could such companies possibly grow huge?

jawngee 17y ago
What an epic stretch. Altair had a business model, they sold something of value for money. Microsoft sold something for money. Neither twitter nor vidly sell anything for money and both will be struggling with monetization schemes for some time to come. Furthermore, the simplicity of what they do will be cloned and aped in months if not weeks, leaving them scrambling to add value, thus complicating their offering, effectively killing what little value they have now. The other problem here is that there are heavy brands that already exist that can sink the whole ship if they chose to, creating a mountain of Everest proportions for Vidly to climb. Look at how many URL shortening services exist today. Simple ideas get cloned quickly, then eventually open sourced, shorting the original business to offering infrastructure over product. Unfortunately the infrastructure for Vidly is dumb simple. Give me an account an encoding.com and twitter library and what more do I really need? And before anyone goes off on the famous I could build that in a week, keep in mind I built massify.com's self-scaling cloud-based HD video encoding solution in about a month, so I know what I'm talking about.
- pg 17y ago
  It's always what you call an "epic stretch" for any company to make it from startup to IPO. By the time they IPOed, Microsoft was so huge, and so different from what they started with, that it's irrelevant what sort of business model they had when they were a couple undergrads writing an interpreter for MITS. Why don't you cut these guys a break? They've just launched. When I recently wrote If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch. I was thinking of TechCrunch. I'm embarrassed for HN to find this attitude here.

volida 17y ago

Twitter blow up?