71–80 of 443 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For better or worse, in colloquial American English, "startup" means a particular type of company, and is only weakly correlated with age.
To most of America, the term "startup" means a vaguely tech-ish company which doesn't know how to make a profit. As a former techie, I strongly agree with that usage.
So I’m curious will property and rental prices drop in San Francisco now that funding is drying up? Can’t seem to find much information about that. For example a friend of mine who was laid off still has to pay $3300 / month for his studio. Curious how long this will last for?
It might be good for those high renters to simply move elsewhere in couple of months when/if there will be many free places on the market. This is experience from elsewhere, from +-2008, so it might not work out exactly like this of course, but generally I would expect so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be that travel never has big enough margins to support a 10k employee middleman.
Expedia and Booking have been around nearly 25 years and both have well over 20k employees. Seems like travel has more than enough margins to support multiple companies that size.
So I’m curious will property and rental prices drop in San Francisco now that funding is drying up? Can’t seem to find much information about that. For example a friend of mine who was laid off still has to pay $3300 / month for his studio. Curious how long this will last for?
Startups are in way better shape than traditional small businesses. By our very nature, we need months of runway just to keep running. We're designed to weather this kind of storm because "zero revenue" is the default state. Hearing about Bird cutting 30% of their workforce is awful. But it's nothing compared to the thin-margin Mom & Pop, or medium sized private enterprise that had 1 week of cash on hand and ceased o…
Recently-funded or reasonably conservative startups should be able to do okay with that, but ones without a lot of runway are going to be in a really difficult position.
The developers wanted to revamp the site to take advantage of all the tech money and provide upgraded experiences etc...
While they were in the middle of building it - the bust happened.
Then, one of the largest buildings that was ~65% complete or so caught fire. It was HUGE - I think it was an 11 alarm fire....
There was a crap ton of speculation as to how this happened - and the prevailing theory among many I knew at the time (I lived right down the street and actually stood across the street watching the thing burn down for a few hours) - was that it was insurance fraud to recoup some of the investment in the multi million dollar development due to the fact that its demographic was now largely out of work.
Obviously they did fine eventually, but lots thought it was an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of the situation.
As an aside, not too long after that, I had a pool aprtty at my place for all the tech people in our circle. 65 people showed up and out of that, only 2 were still employed.
The tech industry is a hell of a lot more resiliant this time - as actually many of the service provided are actually of great value to those stuck at home or unemployed. So this collapse will be nothing like the dot com bust.
However - the wealth transfer this time will be far greater than the 2008 collapse.
The next Black Swan [0]:
Classpass was founded in 2013. Wonderschool was founded in 2012. Can we stop calling companies that age a startup? Or at least stop using them as examples? I mean, the article then goes on to call Airbnb a "home rental start-up". It isn't a start-up, it is over a decade old and has over 10,000 employees.
Startups are in way better shape than traditional small businesses. By our very nature, we need months of runway just to keep running. We're designed to weather this kind of storm because "zero revenue" is the default state. Hearing about Bird cutting 30% of their workforce is awful. But it's nothing compared to the thin-margin Mom & Pop, or medium sized private enterprise that had 1 week of cash on hand and ceased o…
You're absolutely right though. There are folks who are getting decimated who are part of the sustaining normal economy, and comparatively speaking having a "war chest" of capital, either VC supplied or otherwise, is a much more comfortable place to be.
I can't wait to see a pull back to solid fundamentals. I don't see why a daily vacation rental company honestly needs 240 highly paid employees. One company cited in the article (WanderJaunt) laid off 56 out of its 240 total employees, but honestly I bet they could do just well with 20 total employees.
Let's put the Lean back in Lean Startup and provide real value instead of playing the magical, mysterious game of VC musical chairs.
Startups are in way better shape than traditional small businesses. By our very nature, we need months of runway just to keep running. We're designed to weather this kind of storm because "zero revenue" is the default state. Hearing about Bird cutting 30% of their workforce is awful. But it's nothing compared to the thin-margin Mom & Pop, or medium sized private enterprise that had 1 week of cash on hand and ceased o…