Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

Well, that's what an AI told me to do.

Time is also a currency, so you make a trade-off between time (extra years of your life spent acquiring funds to scale, and delayed product launch) and control.

Time is also an issue when you have competition, in the sense that your competitors can get there first by raising money.

Google and Amazon are hardly the classic 100x-hypergrowth model.

Facebook and Twitter DID really mess up, have you seen how much utterly vile stuff you can report to them and it will still be around months later? Have you been at the receiving end of a shitstorm or Nazi trolls? People order SWATs over Twitter, leading to deaths. The president of the US leaves the rest of the world in panic when someone will finally declare war with him after yet another tweet. The reports from former "moderators" all have one thing in common, they're exploited worse than cannon fodder in wars (the soldiers at least were dead, the moderators will have to live with the videos of beheadings and CP the rest of their lives). Airbnb screwed up entire city rental markets and squeezed out thousands of poor people, hardly call that a success. Pinterest? Wtf how on earth is this worth 12 billion dollars? Or Snapchat with 25B $? Where is the actual worth represented in positive effects for society by this?!

In the end all that creates this "wealth" is data. Data is volatile, it's intangible - and once it is too much, the noise ratio gets too high to be useful, and then most of the companies you mentioned will have a massive problem with finances because they're only worth as much as the data and eyeballs of their customers is worth.

> Attract employees that agree with you

and end up like Uber with a reputation of "every one is welcome here, as long he's a white male with tolerance for extremely high alcohol consumption"?

> The market will decide if you are right or not.

The market is so oversaturated with cash that an app that could literally do nothing more than distribute "Yo" could get 1.5M$ cash at 10M$ valuation. The corrective forces of the market have vanished long since, otherwise the business model of many VCs would have broken years ago. To make stuff worse, the employees are often enough paid with options that may or may not become entirely worthless (and some options even are until an IPO or after years of working for the company!). That's gambling with the future in a really toxic way.

And while I'm at gambling: that more and more cash, both from the VC, the institutional financial and the private sector is flowing into ever more "coins" is also something that is dangerous and set up to explode. Yet another consequence of the current cash saturation.

Don't get me wrong: VCs as an institution, startups and coins serve an useful purpose. But in current conditions (both political and financial) they and the business model they run have grown extremely toxic on society.

This is rich coming from the founder of a startup that's indistinguishable from all the other coding bootcamp, MooC startups out there with a dash Deep Learning thrown in to make it extra trendy.

As for the actual advice, I think it's pretty hit or miss.

> 1. Venture Capital Nothing in her description of VC is wrong here. But the lesson: "VC is to be avoided" is an oversimplification. VC money is a tool. It's not always the right tool, and it certainly has its downsides. But it has its upsides too. In many cases it's the only way to get a business off the ground.

> 2. Hypergrowth I don't really know where the author puts the line between hypergrowth and just growth, as PG has said: starts are growth. They must always be growing, is there such thing as too much growth? Maybe, if really bad things are happening in the company because of the growth like people are burning out and quitting... but really that's only bad because eventually it will hurt growth. So I think the simple lesson is grow as fast as possible, don't be short sighted.

> 3. Trying to be “like a family” This one I agree with. Trying to be like a family in a professional setting is dishonest, and eventually the truth of the situation becomes clear. It's better to be honest from the start.

> 4. Attempting to productionize a PhD thesis We'll have to tell Larry Page he's wasting his time trying to turn that dumb Page Rank thesis into a company. There are a lot of companies that fail this way and there are a lot of PhD theses that shouldn't be commercialized but people try none the less. As with all things startups, there's a thousand failures for every success and the only way to tell the difference is to actually found the company.

> 5. Hiring a bunch of academic researchers The only company I've really observed doing this is Google and it seems to have worked out for them. I can easily believe that their are companies out there that higher a bunch of researchers to do a job they're not really capable of doing. I've also known academic researchers who were able to have a huge impact in the role they were hired for even though it wasn't really research. The general statement of this is that you needed to hire people for roles they want to and can perform. Researchers might be a particular anti-pattern in this but it's far from the only one.