91–100 of 398 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I self-funded my startup to the tune of half a million dollars. I've had what I can only assume to be a VC-funded competitor study my endpoints for high latency / expensive queries, then saturate them with millions of requests a second across thousands of simultaneous IP addresses. Business is survival of the fittest. Pressures and growth gradients come in all shapes and sizes.
Why would that be a VC funded competitor specifically?
On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation. There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company. Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed,…
Would you be willing to give a few more details about what happened? I'm not interested in the identities of the companies or people, just interested in a high level overview of what happened. We don't hear these stories often.
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You missed a step, it goes from the central banks to the LPs to the VCs. The big hedge funds that get all of that low/zero interest money are certainly active in private equity AND forcing their behaviors/policies on companies far and wide.
Except you absolutely don't need any connection to the central bank to benefit from their monetary policy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/wall-street-fed-bai...
The Fed selected BlackRock to run a groundbreaking program to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from large companies slammed by the coronavirus crisis.
Certainly these connections help?
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OR (as you say, but many miss) you do not care about being the market leader. I just want to have a nice company with nice people, no stress and making millions for all to live. I don’t need vc money, stress, be the market leader or ‘be faster than the competition’. A LOT of services or products you can make a long term (decades) money with like this. I don’t need more than 10m euros in my life, nor do my colleagues…
As someone who's worked for tons of startups, it's not that binary. For loads of industries, there is simply no viable path without significant outside funding (whether from a VC or very rich founder), and even if you look at some of the most famous outliers (like Atlassian), I don't believe the path they took is even viable these days anymore. For example, if you're selling any sort of business SaaS product these da…
(2) That's a dollar amount that most bootstrappers can swing.
(3) Critically, you don't do SOC2 until you have a critical mass of purchases requiring it.
(4) Many (most?) of your customers, especially your early customers, won't require it, and/or will have alternate paths for companies without a SOC2 attestation.
(5) When you finally do hit the big deal that absolutely demands an attestation, you can often cut a contingent PO: you sign the deal, deliver the stuff, but you don't get paid (or you don't get the last tranche) until you get the SOC2 attestation.
(6) You can get a SOC2 attestation real, real quick.
There may be other things keeping people from bootstrapping SAAS businesses, but this isn't one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OR (as you say, but many miss) you do not care about being the market leader. I just want to have a nice company with nice people, no stress and making millions for all to live. I don’t need vc money, stress, be the market leader or ‘be faster than the competition’. A LOT of services or products you can make a long term (decades) money with like this. I don’t need more than 10m euros in my life, nor do my colleagues…
The biggest obstacle I see to using VC money is that it has a good opportunity to distort incentives. If a company has a vision fulfilling every request outside of the vision could be considered a distraction. The VC has legitimate concerns outside of the scope of the company vision. Apple is one of the few modern companies that I can think of where the VC money was useful. If anyone can remember google before going…
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> You’re so right! It was an absolute disaster for us. Never do it!!!!! has cloudflare ever had a profitable quarter? I could give away my investor's $10 bills all day too
On a skim, they seem to be losing money the same way Amazon did. It's marginal, with a purpose, and could be turned around by trying to.
not very amazon like at all
The article has a lot of interesting points, but seems to miss out on one of the main reasons (IMO) that startups take funding, which is to grow faster than (or as fast as) their competition. Unless you're lucky enough to be in a market segment without competition, you need to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. If they can expand faster, add features faster and get more customers than you, it damages you…
OR (as you say, but many miss) you do not care about being the market leader. I just want to have a nice company with nice people, no stress and making millions for all to live. I don’t need vc money, stress, be the market leader or ‘be faster than the competition’. A LOT of services or products you can make a long term (decades) money with like this. I don’t need more than 10m euros in my life, nor do my colleagues…
Your colleagues can get better jobs elsewhere, so you are constantly competing for talent.
Your customers can get a better deal, or product or service from one of your competitors, so you’re in constant competition with them too.
I recognize there must be good VCs around, but so much of what you see looks really like a kid's game to me. So many douchy people with the same cliche advice acting like they're visionaries. And a certain kind of "lifestyle" "founder" fawning all over them. Starting a company has been commoditized and turned into an internship for smart kids. I know it's not all like this but for anyone seriously interested in doing…
I think it falls into a few categories: and you can _feel_ the difference. There is type one: the company just going through the motions because they're just the NPC that feels "oh I now its time to 'do' VC because that's what everyone does" Then another type: some of the deep tech startups full of super smart people, even publishing papers, and are usually backed by one or more major institutions (universities, comp…
On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation. There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company. Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed,…