Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Y Combinator's Message to Founders

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 264 posts

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#151

Post by matwood »

bushbaba wrote: post #134
liuliu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it is extremely frustrating to watch this unfold. The easiest way to kill inflation is to kill growth. But that won't help people in need anyway. An empty shelf of baby formulas are not a sign of "economy is too hot". It is a sign of supply issue.

Worse yet, everyone over-ordered due to the supply chain issues to reduce future disruptions. We're going to end up in a recession with huge surplus of inventory.

This is what I've been predicting. Right around when the fed crushes demand, the supply chain will finally get fixed, flooding the market with supply that no one now wants.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#152

Post by slg »

tru3_power wrote: post #141
kaycebasques wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In March 2020 they did deep layoffs and cited the need to be “default alive.” Then their main market surprisingly quickly grew in the rest of 2020 I recognize that later in your comment you say "Of course if 2020 had gotten worse maybe they would look smart" but I think it's worthwhile to compare/contrast the pure macroeconomics of early pandemic versus…

Are they just trying to reduce the amount of capital the working class has? Are there no other ways to reduce inflation right now than to curb demand? Wouldn’t a concerted effort to resolve supply issues have a similar effect?

When all you have is a hammer...

Part of the problem is that Congress is largely broken and can't adequately address issues like this. That pushes most of the responsibility onto The Fed and they have a much smaller bag of tools than Congress.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#155

Post by daniel-cussen »

axlee wrote: post #44
gz5 wrote: post #13

Also an opportunity: 1. Good people will be more available (there will be public company cuts and private cuts, as well as resignations, especially people working for companies in the Series B to Series D range (who raised those rounds at the old multiples) who will need massive growth/patience for their options to grow into the new multiples). 2. As businesses cut costs, those are opportunities for products and serv…

> As businesses cut costs, those are opportunities for products and services which enable efficiency. This is key. Innovation aside, if you can simply provide comparable services at a lower price point, the downturn just increased your customer base tenfolds: nobody is looking too much at cutting costs when things are looking up. Find niches that got too greedy over the past few years, and undercut them.

That's happening to me, I'm peddling the exact same thing at half the cost, and it's verifiable. You can just check that it's correct in a second with a laptop, after computing it for several hours on thousands of machines.

https://www.fgemm.com, coming soon.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#156

Post by daniel-cussen »

ackbar03 wrote: post #9
altdataseller wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of startups provide needed products and services. I don't think that's enough. They need to provide needed products/services in a way that can be sold/marketed profitably, and scaled profitably.

Yes. I always need 1 dollar for 95 cents.

You know that's my pitch? Selling a commodity for half. Because I SUCK at selling, so that's my out, the same exact thing anybody can do in exactly the same way, that every company is on track to spend more than 10% of their revenue on, but for half.

The bottleneck of machine learning in half.

In fact you're being quite generous with your offer of 1 dollar for 95 cents, but I must decline. 50 might work much better for you, you might secretly need 1 dollar for 50 cents more than you need 1 dollar for 95 cents. But are embarrassed to ask. Provided we're talking about matrix multiplication.

And like everyone's business plan is turning matrix multiplication, better known as AI, into money, so there could be a good synergy there.

https://www.fgemm.com, coming soon.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#157

Post by daniel-cussen »

drcongo wrote: post #28

> No one cannot predict how bad the economy will get Make an effort YC.

Predicting how bad it will get is possible, it's just apocalyptic thinking, which is frowned upon and dangerous. Like the whole paranoia bullshit thing about how paranoid people are inferior, or something I can't listen to such bullshit. Ties in nicely to making everyone buy and hold, value investors.

Well earlier this week I myself made a prediction this week there would two days were the market would fall, one down -2.9%, the other down -2.2%[1]. I told this to a friend who speculates. Telling him we should talk that day, Sunday, instead of later in the week, because after those shitstorm days he would have no fucking time. Just booked solid, bailing out shit from those storms.

I was wrong, there was one day down -4%, another down I think down -1%. So I was wrong. No one can predict how bad a market will get. At the same time, my speculator friend hasn't written back.

[1] Yeah I realize down -2.2% might be interpreted as a double negative. In other languages like French and Spanish, and African languages, negatives are emphasis. It's an English thing to say even number of negations is positive. Basically so the words in people's denials could be deformed into admissions. Making their defection defective. Obviously the way to express a market rise is "the stock market went up +2%." Note also the + symbol, very rarely seen.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#158

Post by scarface74 »

bachmeier wrote: post #54
aresant wrote: post #18

Dagnabit. Here we go again - this is a fantastic, pragmatic amendment to those notes -> https://dalton.substack.com/p/letter-to-myself-in-late-2008?... For a taste: "Doing multiple small layoffs is a form of cascading failure. Do one layoff, but much much deeper than seems correct. Do it decisively. Do it so that you get profitable. In your case that is something like a 70% cut, not a 5-10% cut. Yes you read that rig…

> a 70% cut...Cutting once and cutting hard allows you to reassure the people that are still here that you are truly profitable If your employees are dumb enough that they interpret a 70% cut of the workforce as a sign that your company is stable, you're doomed. It's hard to imagine the dumbest person in the world interpreting that as a sign of stability.

I took the opposite approach around 2010. I was one of the survivors of the mass layoff and I didn’t think about looking for another job.

I did build up my savings, actively engage my network “just in case” and updated my resume.

Once the final hammer hit and we got acquired for our customer list and everyone got laid off. We went to lunch, hung out in the office after our layoffs and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone had a job within a month.

At each round of layoffs, people reached out to their network and had jobs quickly.

I met a recruiter for lunch that following Monday and had an offer Thursday.

No matter how your company is doing, you should always “keep your running shoes around your neck”.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#159

Post by scarface74 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #123

Bleak. "No one cannot predict how bad the economy will get, but things don't look good." Clif notes: - Plan for the worst ... cut costs within 30 days... get to Default Alive[0] - Get money if you need it, and if you can - With or without money you must survive 24 months - VCs are people too, and subject to the same downturn. Adjust your fund raising expectations in the same direction. Expect lower valuations, lower…

The stock market is not the economy. If you are working for a money losing VC backed company and the VCs aren’t willing to keep throwing money at you, that’s because the VCs know startup funding is a Ponzi Scheme and they will be left holding the bag instead of being able to pawn their investment off onto the retail market.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#160

Post by lumost »

BryanBeshore wrote: post #144
hef19898 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which raises the question of when to jump ship, doesn't it? If your current employer is looking like lay offs and bad times are a head, and the market is really good, do you stay and wait or do you start looking now ? You defenitley shouldn't wait to be last one to tirn of the lights, because at the very least your gonna compete with your former co-workers.

If you plan to move in the next 6-12 months, you are probably better off moving now.

Pretty much, if you can choose the parts of the company which are profitable and self sustaining. If given the choice, avoid profitable businesses that rely on other companies growth projections (aka ads)
Post reply on HN