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How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#112It's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness. Self-driving cars, VR, EVs, AI, and so on. People soon realize that you can't just take a bunch of hipster tech employees and suddenly create non-solutions that need to have problems created for them to even be solutions, much less choosing extreme…
Will be amazed if this stays the top comment. Would not be surprised if the submission gets flagged.
It's the truth.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness But we retain the solutions that work. A slime mold tries a bunch of useless paths in a maze before it finds the right one. Then it trims and reinforces. Most start-ups failing isn't a sure sign of wasted work.
What startups have provided lasting real solutions and value, not just capitalistic, in say the last decade?
Beyond Meat is pretty neat.
Ceph? (Inktank was founded in 2011 by Sage Weil and DreamHost, which then it raised 1M in 2012 from Mark Shuttleworth, then RedHat bought them for 175M in 2014. Seems like a nice startup stort, no? The project itself was started around 2004 by Weil at LLNL, and then he worked on it as part of his PhD still in 2007, then the work continued at DreamHost, probably because Weil is one of the co-founders of DreamHost.)
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#114It's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness. Self-driving cars, VR, EVs, AI, and so on. People soon realize that you can't just take a bunch of hipster tech employees and suddenly create non-solutions that need to have problems created for them to even be solutions, much less choosing extreme…
Will be amazed if this stays the top comment. Would not be surprised if the submission gets flagged. It's the truth.
HN is not immune to hyperbole and hype. (And now it's pretty trendy to hate on startups.) While he truth is ... a lot more complicated.
AR/VR was hardly a pump and dump. There are massive technical and creative challenges for both, but ... I fail to see how it was a pump and dump. (Unless you mean Faceberg and Moogle spending ridiculous amounts on it, probably because Neuromancer was pretty damn influential.)
Similarly self-driving cars clearly have value (~1.3M people die each year on the roads absolutely unnecessarily, as most of them could have been prevented ... 1.3M people die of TBC, which is again preventable)
If you think EV is a bubble I would like to offer you this nice prospectus of leisure activities on Venus. (Uh, one hyperbole, thanks HN!) That said EV seems the same kind of bubble as housing. The prices are high because of the demand. Battery prices (the biggest cost currently in EVs) keep going down. Demand is going up. Heatwaves are pretty good marketing "for" global warming.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is simply not true. Most startup founders are genuinely trying to build something that has value to the economy, and therefore society. Most fail early, most of what's left fails later, but some go on to be real, profitable, businesses. That's how it works outside of the startup world too. Most restaurants, clothing stores, car repair shops, etc. go out of business after just a few years, while a few move on to…
Your last paragraph paints a dual vision of the world that just isn't accurate. There are the two you mentioned: 1- small businesses that go out of business after a few years 2- ...ones that become big chains But you are forgetting #3, the one that actually makes up the largest proportion of businesses: 3- people that quietly, successfully, run their businesses in a sustainable, family and community oriented manner (…
Big business is frighteningly efficient at being BIG. (At least in the US.)
https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt
~42% of the workforce is employed at firms with 1000+ headcount.
The next biggest bucket is ~10% the 20-49 range. Then ~9.5% is the 100-249 bucket.
And the share of biggest ones is (likely unfortunately) growing.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#116My head immediately jumps to YikYak but I know there were some others in this domain 10 years ago. I can't think of many recently though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak
Ah Yik Yak was fun, until it got kind of... dark.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#117Like a lot. Didn't YC even fund that startup that wanted to turn middle class suburban homeowners into slumlords by building rental poverty shacks in their back yards?
You're thinking of Pippin[0], and yours is about the most uncharitable take I can imagine, and I wasn't even a fan of the idea. [0] https://spencerburleigh.com/blog/2022/12/21/shutdown/
I would say phrased uncharitably, but factually right on the money IMO. I strongly suspect that if this scaled it would have caused an explosion in the number of landlords while also making property even more expensive because now all of a sudden you can turn every PPoR into a rental as well. Absolute nightmare scenario.
Thankfully the market took care of this idea and they only made 10 "houses" before going pop apparently.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most startup founders are genuinely trying to get wealthy, and not really good 9-5 job wealthy. Properly wealthy.
Both? Most humans on earth are trying to get wealthy, they just don't see a viable path in front of them.
Most humans on earth are trying to survive, they just don't see a viable path in front of them
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, for all the perceived (and real) failures, the last few generations of these experiments have spawned some of the highest earning, and arguably transformative, companies in history.
Which ones?
Which huge companies were spawned from the last few decades of startups raising VC? I think almost all the biggest companies today?
Here's a list I grabbed of the highest market-cap companies: 1. Apple 2. Microsoft 3. NVIDIA 4. Alphabet (Google) 5. Amazon 6. Saudi Aramco 7. Meta Platforms (Facebook) 8. Berkshire Hathaway 9. TSMC 10. Tesla
Of this list, here are "startups" that raised VC money: 1. Apple 2. Microsoft 3. NVIDIA 4. Alphabet (Google) 5. Amazon 6. Meta Platforms (Facebook) 7. Tesla
So more than half of the top-10 biggest companies today were these kinds of startup "experiments".
And of course, these are just the biggest companies, and don't include many things I interact with on a day-to-day basis, which are incredibly valuable to me, e.g. Netflix, ChatGPT, YouTube (part of Alphabet but important enough to warrant mentioning), etc.
Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
#120Like a lot. Didn't YC even fund that startup that wanted to turn middle class suburban homeowners into slumlords by building rental poverty shacks in their back yards?
You're thinking of Pippin[0], and yours is about the most uncharitable take I can imagine, and I wasn't even a fan of the idea. [0] https://spencerburleigh.com/blog/2022/12/21/shutdown/
> Pippin
I'm fascinated by how the most ethically dubious companies tend to take their names from Tolkien: Palantir, Anduril, Pippin...