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Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

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Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#301

Post by notfromhere »

pkdpic wrote: post #230
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, if you are job hunting, be sure to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date.

Thats helpful (but rare) to hear. Does anyone have any concrete anecdotes reinforcing the importance of keeping linkedin looking fresh? Also what matters? Artful descriptions of past positions? Activity on timeline? Upvotes on skills? Links to projects?

My last 4 roles came out of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out.

Having detailed job descriptions with rich detail as to what you did and a good number of connections in the industry you’re looking in is what drives the algo

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#302

Post by yunwal »

ejb999 wrote: post #274
yunwal wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, twitter’s worth about 40% of what it was when Musk bought it. Hardly a success story.

and they are the only tech company that is down 40% or more since their high, correct?

Not the only one, but idk why people would follow Musk’s lead as opposed to, say, Tim Cook’s, when apple’s valuation has barely taken a dip.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#303

Post by tstrimple »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #93
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more. Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I hav…

I'm often perplexed when I hear people complain about cloud costs. I can't tell if people just have really different workloads than I've experienced or if they just haven't considered cost when they pick their compute, databases, etc. If you use object storage, some serverless database, and some serverless compute a small company (by which I'm thinking "normally very low volume with occasional, very important, often…

These complaints mostly seem to come from folks who are spinning up lots of VMs and architecting solutions the same way they would build in a data center. If you're running VMs 24/7 of course it's going to be expensive.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#304

Post by jdlshore »

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #292
idunno246 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc. I’m at a few orders of magnitude more spend than that, and in absolute dollars is very much noticeable how much more expensive aws is. But as a percentage of costs it’s so little next to wages, as is your example, that cost is really the wrong thing to get hung up on. Most engineers I’ve worked with don’t…

I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud. This is because I have to factor all the costs. This inclu…

37signals disagrees. They’re moving off the cloud and have published several blog entries about the process and the approx ~1mm/yr (fully loaded) they expect to save.

I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers.

The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here:

https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/

There was a recent article that made the HN in front page that broke down the savings they expected, but I’m on mobile and can’t find it now. Something about “two datacenter racks.”

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#305

Post by SassyGrapefruit »

jdlshore wrote: post #304
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud. This is because I have to factor all the costs. This inclu…

37signals disagrees. They’re moving off the cloud and have published several blog entries about the process and the approx ~1mm/yr (fully loaded) they expect to save. I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers. The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here: https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022…

Where are the numbers and how do they calculate them? This article lists their cloud spend in detail then "waves hands" at the Datacenter costs simply saying "it will be far far less". Ok why not break it down?

I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.

Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#307

Post by tiborsaas »

ryanSrich wrote: post #218
est31 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally if you are a senior big tech employee you are not living paycheck to paycheck any more, so you could endure a few months of not being employed. And even then, if you are good and have a network, you would find employment very quickly if a startup fails, unless there is some event that causes all startups to not look for new employees. The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (sh…

> endure a few months of not being employed What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months? Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself a…

You don't need to be close to it if you are willing to give up saving like you used to. If you can prove any traction I be you can raise a little money from FFF for a few months more.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#308

Post by ryanSrich »

tiborsaas wrote: post #307
ryanSrich wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> endure a few months of not being employed What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months? Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself a…

You don't need to be close to it if you are willing to give up saving like you used to. If you can prove any traction I be you can raise a little money from FFF for a few months more.

Okay let’s play this out.

A few months is 2. For the sake of this hypothetical let’s say it’s 3.

You’re saying that someone can build a product that’s capable of having investor level revenue within a few months? Or not even revenue, but more than 5 companies using it? This one person is not only building a fully functioning software product that’s capable of being useful to companies, but also doing high levels of networking to find those customers and users. They’re doing this all within 3 months? I just don’t see how that’s possible. The fastest moving early stage teams I’ve ever seen have gone to market in no less than 4 months, and that was with multiple people working on the problem.

I think at a minimum you can expect it to take 6 months if you’re going at it alone. Certainly less if you have other co-founders.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#309

Post by yunwal »

seattle_spring wrote: post #97

How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!" Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.

I've been thinking about this recently and I think the answer (for me) is to get a non-tech job/full-time-hobby for a bit. It makes sense that all the ideas in the "corporate office/tech infra" space are all used up. Every single person capable of building tech products encounters problems in these spaces, very few encounter problems that can be solved in, say, medical spaces, or commercial kitchens, or whatever. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to have original ideas.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#310

Post by yunwal »

patientplatypus wrote: post #38

This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece - He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place. So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business? Or this - Zhu…

> So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?

The dumbest dismissals of business ideas always start with this phrase. Moats aren't like some obvious thing where you pull up a ladder and no one can follow you. Usually just having a slightly better UX (or a UX that people are used to) is enough to be a moat. Users latch onto things they have good experiences with.

Of course, if you want to benefit from anticompetitive business practices (outprice competition, drive them out of business, hike prices), rather than value creation, you need a big pull-up-ladder-type moat, but not every company needs to be Uber/Lyft getting in winner-take-all funding wars.

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