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Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

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Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#111

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

It is better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion.

All good things in life comes from collaboration with others as much as individual contributions, but there is nothing that says that collaboration has to be imposed by a external force, like with a company. The world has ruled before with open collaboration like science, and what we call "open source", "open hardware" today.

BTW, if I could do anything to destroy the vision that all the world is going to be controlled by oligopoly juggernauts and bureaucracies, I will, including creating new companies or helping young people to renew the landscape, as facebook or Google did(when companies success in a free market, next they want to destroy it).

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#112

Post by jbjohns »

sliverstorm wrote: post #105
georgemcbay wrote: post #30

I don't think he is completely wrong but I think this is just another (higher-end) instance of the age-old tradition of companies saying it is too difficult to find engineers while being unwilling to pay fair value for said engineers. To be clear, I know that Facebook does pay quite well by industry standards (offset somewhat by the bay area cost of living) for top talent, but if this situation is causing them an iss…

You seem to be adopting the point of view that whatever pay is required to attract an engineer is the right pay. But what about when that pay eclipses the engineer's marginal value-add to the company? I think it not unreasonable to speak up if you feel there is a short-sighted market force overvaluing a resource. Imagine you are a farmer, and the value of grain falls below the cost to produce it. Do you accept what T…

No. You realize the market no longer values your product enough to pay for it, so you drop it and move to something else. When enough farmers do that the price will come up again.

If a software company can't get enough value out of software developers to make it worthwhile then either they need to find a way to charge more or maybe the market doesn't see the need for them to exist.

Whatever pay is required to attract engineers is the right price. The only question is; is your idea good enough to still be profitable given the price floor?

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#113

Post by jbjohns »

long wrote: post #89
niketdesai wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair goal, and I believe the answer breaks down like this: You can work for a big company that serves billions of people, claiming that you are making an impact on the world, while in reality doing nothing. On the other hand you can start your own company, perhaps only directly impacting a few hundred people, and still accomplish the goal of maximizing your change on the world (as that was your ceiling).

Parker is arguing that in many cases, the engineer can actually have a bigger impact at the bigger company (e.g. because it leverages economies of scale and having lots of startups fragmentizes the talent pool).

It's a self-serving argument. A bigger overall impact is more likely when there are tons and tons of smaller companies out there trying ideas (i.e. the chance of one of them hitting the next big thing). If all these engineers just go work at Facebook instead, Parker will feel the biggest impact in his stock value. Individual engineers might do better at FB than they would have failing at their own company, but on the whole the economy lost whatever some of them would have made.

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#114

Post by jbjohns »

orblivion wrote: post #39
MatthewB wrote: post #10

Thinking in the most simplistic form possible - how about engineers just doing what makes them the most happy? Forget about whether we could provide more value at an established company. Maybe building our own products is our passion. That alone will drive more value than doing something we're not passionate about. Just a thought. Whether early stage startups are overvalued is a different topic to be discussed.

Again that drains talent, though, if they're working on it full time.

Good. No one has the right to having employees. If you want employees, you pay what it takes to attract them. Parker is trying to manipulate the market here to get prices down to what he wants to be paying.

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#115

Post by jbjohns »

psychotik wrote: post #50

At Startup School, the Sequoia guy showed a bunch of slides which had two main points highlighted: - Companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn raised very modest amounts of funding and has multi-billion dollar IPOs - Cost of creating a company (and associated technology) is down over 90% from what it was back when a lot of these companies were started. Given these two, it's amazing to see VCs pouring in milli…

>Companies are ridiculously over funded, and VCs are doing a disservice to their investors as well as to their portfolio companies by giving more money than they need.

No they're not. They're following the market. If they were doing a disservice to their investors, do you think the investors would just sit back and lose millions?

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#116

Post by JabavuAdams »

long wrote: post #83
earl wrote: post #5

"The problem in his view is that many of the talented engineers and product designers who are now starting their own companies could have a bigger impact at places like Facebook, and they in turn will have a hard time attracting the best talent because those people can get funded to start their own projects as well." Obviously I just read TC's article and didn't see what Parker said, but what's notably missing from t…

What if the engineer's goal is to have the biggest possible impact on the world?

That's a stupid goal. Meta-Godwin.

EDIT> Limiting the discussion to tech, if you want to have the biggest possible impact, you should be working on AI or IA.

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#117

Post by JabavuAdams »

jbjohns wrote: post #115
psychotik wrote: post #50

At Startup School, the Sequoia guy showed a bunch of slides which had two main points highlighted: - Companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn raised very modest amounts of funding and has multi-billion dollar IPOs - Cost of creating a company (and associated technology) is down over 90% from what it was back when a lot of these companies were started. Given these two, it's amazing to see VCs pouring in milli…

>Companies are ridiculously over funded, and VCs are doing a disservice to their investors as well as to their portfolio companies by giving more money than they need. No they're not. They're following the market. If they were doing a disservice to their investors, do you think the investors would just sit back and lose millions?

Yes.

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#118

Post by jbjohns »

mattmanser wrote: post #8
ghc wrote: post #4

How exactly does he expect the internet to consolidate like the PC industry? How can the internet consolidate?

It's happening already. Salesforce is buying up a bunch of different online b2b tools. Google is trying Google+, integrated Google Voice. Skype and MS. Facebook places. Games are growing on social networks instead of standalone flash game sites. Techcrunch is bought by AOL.

So what? New ones also spring up and sometimes the new ones are big enough to eat the old ones. From what I can see, the market is in a continuous state of expand->consolidate->repeat.

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#119

Post by jbjohns »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #117
jbjohns wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies are ridiculously over funded, and VCs are doing a disservice to their investors as well as to their portfolio companies by giving more money than they need. No they're not. They're following the market. If they were doing a disservice to their investors, do you think the investors would just sit back and lose millions?

Yes.

You have a pretty low opinion of people who've managed to make large sums of money. If they're as stupid as you think, maybe that money would be better utilized by people who aren't?

Re: Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

#120

Post by nl »

davidhansen wrote: post #75
lbarrow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm not in a position to comment on the amount of funding in the early-stage startup world, but this particular comment by Parker reads like another executive whining that engineers are too independent.

Not just the independence aspect, but the hubris with which he complains about the most brilliant minds choosing to not work on, well, a social network site . It's 2011; we are traversing inflection points of development in solar energy, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and seeing the early, dramatic fruits of stem cell research, and Parker is bitching that the best of the best aren't keen on improving software that s…

To be fair, many regard that same social networking site to have been a critical factor in at least two of the Arab Spring revolutions.

One would almost dare to think that helping people communicate is useful or something crazy like that!

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