281–290 of 398 posts
That's it. You can never make more time for yourself. That's the lesson.
>Making existing customers happy is less important than acquiring many more new customers. As long as your shares are becoming more valuable, what's wrong with that?
If your goal is to maximize the amount of money you make from a venture, there's nothing wrong with it. There's everything right with it, that's why it's done that way.
If your goal is to produce value in the world over a long term, then there's a lot wrong with it. Optimizing for actual value delivered is disincentivized.
It seems the author views venture capitalists as a bunch of idiots who are eager to lose money. And yet, venture capitalists are making money and many founders along with them. Ok, if your goal is to have a very small business, with just a few employees and a few customers, rule that business how you want and have fun, you can bootstrap your business and keep it small. But I think the majority of founders would prefe…
So they are not carefully trying to grow each company - they are adding lots of fertiliser and seeing what survives. In fact they make success harder for you by the things they force you to do. This is fine for them because one company will grow big but not fine for you unless you are that one company.
Only take rocket fuel (VC funding) if you've got a rocket (PMF in a massive TAM with net revenue retention) If you don't have a rocket, the rocket fuel will be wasted and disappointing in any other vehicle. Ideally you bootstrap until it's clear. But if you start the company with VC funding, you should know the expectation. If you truly have a rocket the economics of VC funding is favorable for everyone.
How do you know if you have a Rocket? Many (most?) VC funded companies are just appearance, no substance and it’s all very apparent. All the new AI ‘products’ for instance. So those are clearly not rockets, just blah and hype. Maybe we had rockets before, but I don’t want to lie and cheat like some of our vc invested companies did (most are gone). Never were rockets, just hype, Twitter presence and faking all around.
That’s the trick… you don’t. And neither do they.
I believe it’s a pretty well-understood statistic that most VC-funded businesses are not successful, and the VCs are only successful because a small number of investments are massively profitable.
Neither VCs nor companies know for sure if they _will_ rocket. VCs are looking for businesses and founders who _could_ rocket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get almost no money in salary, and you spend something way more valuable than money: time, during your most energetic and precious years of life typically. I think it’s really dangerous to put rose tinted glasses on the whole thing. For anyone not upper class, if you spend 6 or so years chasing a startup and fail, and you’re a good software developer.. once you factor in savings and interest, your total opportuni…
Agree that’s the right analysis for many people. Wasn’t arguing whether you should start a startup or not. Just that if you do bootstrapping isn’t inherently better than raising venture capital. Your broader point is important too: startups are unfortunately too often a luxury of the upper class. It is extremely scary to take a risk when you don’t have a safety net. I was personally broke when we started Cloudflare a…
But there are also plenty of people that have worked for a while, provided themselves a safety net and go on the startup journey in their 30s and 40s. Eg. Eric Yuan, who was a eng VP already before zoom.
But I guess those don’t grab the same headline attention.
With how ubiqutous VC funding became in recent years, only small market niches are "viable" for non-VC funded startups. VCs will often still fund small market niches if they believe they can expand easily.
If you sell, say, 10-20% of your company to VCs, how can they force you to behave differently? Why can't you move on as if you were bootstrapped, while using the cash for whatever your company needs at the time (hiring, marketing, etc.).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're arguing with economics here... https://news.stanford.edu/2022/09/06/what-causes-inflation/ Inflation rises when the Federal Reserve sets too low of an interest rate or when the growth of money supply increases too rapidly – as we are seeing now, says Stanford economist John Taylor. I never said you needed central bank connections to get a home loan. To get infinite runway on unsecured risk is a very different…
> You're arguing with economics here... No, I'm arguing against die-hard monetarists who still buy Friedman's bullshit 25 years after the Asian financial crisis and 15 years after the subprimes crisis. Japan has had more than two decade of low interests with no inflation, and the rest of the world had one decade with the same result, but as these people are cultists, they don't care about facts and they never did. In…
> This is goalpost moving.
My comments have been under the context of the post, VC funding. With VCs, you often find companies spring from nowhere with a marketing blitz or infinite runway in an exclusive access phase. This is not accessible to the common person, and in my opinion stems from a modernly masked form of nepotism. This is also not accessible in a world that requires near-term profitability, so maybe more of this will be broken in the years to come by economic realities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're arguing with economics here... No, I'm arguing against die-hard monetarists who still buy Friedman's bullshit 25 years after the Asian financial crisis and 15 years after the subprimes crisis. Japan has had more than two decade of low interests with no inflation, and the rest of the world had one decade with the same result, but as these people are cultists, they don't care about facts and they never did. In…
I appreciate the context and will research the differences you shared; this topic interests me. > This is goalpost moving. My comments have been under the context of the post, VC funding. With VCs, you often find companies spring from nowhere with a marketing blitz or infinite runway in an exclusive access phase. This is not accessible to the common person, and in my opinion stems from a modernly masked form of nepot…