"If you are building something which is genuinely extraordinary, that’s always the right answer."
The gold rush is never over for extraordinary companies.
After the Gold Rush
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: After the Gold Rush
#22It's funny because the means through which big business tech companies have "co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them" is through buying said startups. So no, I don't think it's all over. You can't type on a keyboard and make an automobile factory that can compete with the big car companies, but in software, you pretty much can. It's a pretty chaotic market for this reason even if there are big dog…
It's not over. Big business [anything] companies become slower with each new process and bozo explosion.
Re: After the Gold Rush
#23No the social gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that. And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken. If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you…
> And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.
Ssssh, don't give away the secret. ;)
Actually, startups designed to sell to other startups will fail too when the whole thing collapses like a stack of cards...
Enter Mandrill, which recently found its conversion funnel so ineffective that they suddenly shut the entire system down.
Re: After the Gold Rush
#24Re: After the Gold Rush
#25I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don't see any, I exit out. If you're going to talk about financial/economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.
There's maybe one small number observation, I m not sure if it's correct as there maybe high growth YC companies which will soon pass those 3/4.
"In 2011, Y Combinator’s poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Maybe Instacart, if their unit economics work. That’s it."
Re: After the Gold Rush
#26Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave. Startup gold-rush is anything but over. Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?
It will go into the giants, for whom the zero interest rate regime provided exactly the right conditions to monopolize by buying up their competitors. Things will only get more extreme in this regard until we accept that change is beneficial and let the giants.
The article provides no clear metric for success, just impressions based on brand success. Things are not so rosy for its darlings as it implies. A price to earnings ratio of 70+ is quite a risk, no matter how sure it seems that such a company becomes a permanent monopoly. I feel that the low (now negative!) interest rates offered by central banks are fueling a huge bubble in the valuation of these companies.
Re: After the Gold Rush
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is also kind of missing that you can't easily draw parallels with the past here, as the field we are mostly talking about – software making, I think – is the first(?) modern big industry field where the means of production are in the hand of the workers. You can't easily compete with car companies, cause most of us won't have the means to even produce a prototype. But nothing is stopping someone capable en…
There is lack of freely available hardware on which said os to run - a lot of companies try to be your gatekeepers. The golden days like in the 90-s everything is PC, you can run whatever you want on PC are still somewhere ahead of us with mobile and IoT.
Mobile app stores are owned by two tech giants. Expect more and more stories like https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-you...
Re: After the Gold Rush
#28No the social gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that. And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken. If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you…
>Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that.
I don't think that is true. Less than 50% of humans have regular access to the Internet. Do you really think that more than half the people on the planet do not want to get online?
Re: After the Gold Rush
#29The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish
Re: After the Gold Rush
#30Maybe the "gold rush" is over. But there's still a heck of a lot of gold to mine. We're not even close to the point where there is no more valuable software to be written (and sold).