61–65 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no free market mechanism that can prevent the sale of the market.
That's the government's job. The government fails at it now and then, which is why the citizens need to vigilant and careful in whom they elect. Do you believe that if the government ran the economy (socialism) there would be no corruption?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So substitute Amazon, Facebook, or any of the companies that people have many complaints with, yet continue to funnel their business to because competitors can't match the network effects.
The last I checked, using Google search is free. What do you think would happen if they started charging for it?
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Yup. The "two economies; two moneys" divide between urban coastal America & the Rust Belt / Deep South is probably one of the greatest silent threats to American security. Historically nation-states do not survive divides in regional inequality that are this big or this entrenched; the temptation grows for the rich region to secede and engage more with the global economy, while the resentment from the poor region bui…
Happening in other developed countries as well. Mega-cities and urban coastal corridors are globalizing faster than the nation-states to which they are legally subsumed under. Cities are beginning to test the boundaries of their prescribed sovereignty in trade and other matters.
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies. They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled en…
"blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy." That says it all. Really, that's how YC works - fail fast and cheap, profit from the survivors. Great for VCs, not so much for the cannon fodder. "We have reserves."
Even worse for the users. In this analogy, if startups are cannon fodder, users/customers are the blood that gets spilled. Startups really should have this written on a tin: "We're are experiments to our investors. Our product is an experiment to us. We do not care about you, or helping you, and we will not change the world; our regular marketing copy is just straight-faced lie. The entire stack, from us up to invest…
Though it would be a stretch to say they don't care nor help the users. Of course they need to keep the users hooked/get new users onboard to "grow" and get the investments. And focusing on marketing is not very reasonable since you can say the same about basically every marketing material.
Still, I guess the point is that the customers of such startups must always be prepared of the possibility of the company suddenly shutting down one day and the product ceasing to exist. That's true.