161–170 of 320 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone has been massively successful, that means they know how to be successful. It must be the case they have something of value to say. How can you make the argument they have nothing of value to say?
Or they had family with money and connections.
Powerful message, but what is going on with the formatting of this post? Why are lines highlighted with two different colors?
Great note/outline format, if I already know the key ideas/takeaways and where they are relative to each other, but really awful to follow reading it for the first time.
My key takeaways: 1. Remote work, no code, social media, and ecommerce platforms all make it easier to bootstrap new businesses from zero to revenue 2. (From Wikipedia) Mittelstand commonly refers to a group of stable business enterprises in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that have proved successful in enduring economic change and turbulence. The term is difficult to translate and may cause confusion for non-German…
The original article uses the plural too, Mittelstands, but it sounds really weird in German since it's more of mass noun (it's as if you referred to various pots of sugar as 'the sugars'). I believe the correct word would be Mittelständler, but if you're going to anglicize it, Mittelstanders would much better than Mittelstands in my opinion. Then again, I'm not a native speaker of either German or English...
Without some system that isn't inherently about 'move fast, big returns, oh and also it really helps if you're a young man with a Stanford connection and a way to get through the period of time where you have no income' then we get the technology that results from that. And the 'system' reflects a funding situation where big investors, often having 'good' missions (the LPs I mean) look to folks from SV VC to pattern-match their way into high returns.
If you are building a business and it's a "good business" that can be profitable early then great, but you will be stuck at scale (or in almost anything consumer-facing in tech) with only the companies willing to maximally exploit the systems that I think we know are extractive and unsustainable.
Like with most systems problems, it's hard to know what the 'answer' is- if you buy into this line of thinking- but I hope we'll start trying new ways to approach the problem, whether it's by putting some pressure on the LPs or by making it easier to crowdfund or by some more radical means...
I'm a fan of bootstrapped companies and have started and operated a couple of them, sometimes quite successfully. But I don't understand how the economics of funding them are supposed to work. VC is a star-search business. Most businesses fail, and that includes businesses run conservatively with organic growth. In a portfolio like that, the winners have to pay for the losers, or the math just doesn't work.
Somehow to allow them to "exit" at 1/10/100 instead of trying for 1b or crash would be nice. But it would need a different type of "VC" partner.
One funding mechanism could be something akin to "guilds" - once you have a group of ten or so of these businesses "together" they could help fund additional ones. A "guild-like" setup (think Union of workers that owns a percentage of the companies, perhaps) could be used to fund new ones starting out.
Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices. I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mos…
For real, most VC's could take 100 different shots on solo devs who just need their living expenses paid... like me.
People think it allows people to be slackers and just sit around smoking weed and playing video games all day and otherwise be an unproductive member of society, and yes, there's some truth to that.
But there's also a lot of people that have the desire to create some cool and useful stuff, but are already burnt out by working 40 hours a week at a job they have to work at to pay the bills.
That fits me, as well. I've got two projects that are half-written and probably just need another 200 hours or so of work to release an MVP, but after looking at code all day, more code is the last thing I wanna do when I log off for the day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hum... I answered that just on the next phrase. But now that you enumerated more, you can add "national economy" too.
> Hum... I answered that just on the next phrase. Concerning "And quite likely brings better results for both the investor and the founders.": That "[it] brings better results" for some groups does not imply that it more healthy for this group. Also the other way round: "more healthy for some group" does not necessarily imply "better results for this group". In this sense I did not think that this phrase was to be co…
It looks more healthy for both groups. I do expect it to bring better both first-order and second-order results. (Those two are always correlated, and on investment relationships they are very strongly correlated.)
Am I the only one not interested in taking advice from someone who has largely been massively successful? I always feel like these are the people who generally have nothing of real value to say, they just think they do because of their bias from their success.
It is up to you to be able to filter good information from bad. Wealthy founders do share some opinions that will help you be wealthy. However you need to learn to discriminate between good advice and bad advice. Your blanket ban seems poorly thought out to me.
Bonus unwelcome advice: you appear to be using the word successful to mean wealthy. Perhaps deconstruct your worldview a bit.
Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices. I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mos…
Your story with IPinfo.io is profoundly compelling; have you written anything about your journey? > "let's be ambitious and serve a large market and create the best products with great people, but let's run this as a marathon and not a sprint, and let's not risk everything on a big outcome" This sounds so great.
https://saasclub.io/podcast/ipinfo-ben-dowling/