Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

Amazon is running out of people willing to work in its warehouses; gig work gets old fast.

Low unemployment is unsustainable if it’s unfulfilling errand running.

There’s little net new invention going on in entrenched big tech; Bezos and co are riding high on mathematical inference by accountants; it’s a math scam being forced upon people who can’t “see” how he’s not really invented anything new; distributed computing under unified api; wow.

Capturing eyeballs is easy when the masses are oblivious; the biological quirk religion stumbled upon is being intentionally manipulated.

Except for nation state prestige, there’s little net new coming out of all these tech companies; writing apps and todo lists? Come on. Video games? 40+ years old. Better chat bots? Meh.

Story mode still rules; we’re iterating on the childhood nostalgia of 70-80s kids who also happen to be the early tech boom crowd; shock. Where is the net new? We’re getting faster with higher resolution.

Propping up the dollar in lock step with history. Which is why I believe all the pipe dreams about singularity and rockets to nowhere will never happen; kids growing up with these things will see sooner than the elders who were mesmerized by this stuff that it’s all “nuclear powered rocket cars” again.

Generational churn is what’s creating the rocky situation politically. Society will stabilize on a “new normal” as more of the 50+ crowd dies off. And the normal the 20-30s crowd wants is progressive; they’ve not lost their desire for political change as they age into their 30s like prior generations did as inequality still controls their life; prior generations lost their progressiveness as they bought houses and had families; something even 30 year olds cannot do; the elders have monopolized having a good life. The young want to be represented by like minded people and are just waiting out the resistance.

80% of last gens Fortune 500 are gone. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and open up economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

Same will happen as the elders with monopoly on politics die. Chip companies aren’t going anywhere, but HN is a filter bubble; there’s little dedication to these stupid software companies among the young; see FB use tanking among teens. No one I know under 40 cares about Metas verse, but it was on Today the other day! They’re gaming the clueless. The veil is pierced and frankly software as an industry deserves it; most is copy-paste work while everyone else grows their potatoes.

- Gov, especially cyber + analytics (we do graph ai + gpu viz stuff)

- Supply chain: A slowdown is happening, but COVID, regional conflicts, etc. makes needs for manufacturing etc. companies here super burning

- Cyber + fraud: The need hasn't gone away (more automated attacks every day!), though companies based around VC blitz and pushing their gaping tech + operational holes to acquirers are hurting as fewer people happy to give them free $

- Devops was hard and remains hard. Digital transformation is an ongoing process and still needs a lot of help.

But another example that comes to mind (as someone who lives in that income bracket about half by choice and half not) are car repairs (you HAVE to pony up or you lose your job, so the question becomes 'borrow 1k or lose 100% of your income').

Oh, and any time childcare is fucked up for any reason. Kid can't go to daycare/school because they're sick for a week? Parents don't get PTO, so their only option is to eat a week's worth of wages, and since income in is close to or level with expenses out, that means making it up with debt.

The 'strong arming' comes in because society is set up to make those your only options. (versus having public transit to rely on, walkable cities, or cheap car rentals, for example).