The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
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Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#2Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#3Isn't it expected? With the high interest rates, how can insane valuations be kept?
Also it means that ~15% of them still go public and that's good stats. Many others will just keep existing as going concerns, bringing profits to investors. In perverted mind of a VC that qualifies as failure, but it really isn't.
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#4That is fine by me. What benefit have we gotten from these Unicorn other than enriching the founders and lenders.
I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#5That is fine by me. What benefit have we gotten from these Unicorn other than enriching the founders and lenders. I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Do you think that LLMs are not a benefit? Smartphones? Electric cars?
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#6Maybe because the products suck and there are very few business models for software? I'm gonna focus on the software product segment, and my evaluation might be flawed, but I think that software is an inherent race to the bottom for three important reasons:
1) Dependence on proprietary software is at best a short-term support boon, and in the majority of cases a crippling liability when the vendor changes support terms or goes under (personal experience talking).
2) Open source software is a slow but inevitable creep towards feature-matching and quality that has borne ample fruit already.
3) As ephemeral information with near-zero material cost other than labor, software finds most low-hanging fruit quickly, while higher-hanging fruit attract the formation of non-profit foundations to continue development; there just aren't many more interesting software products to offer.
Working business models in the tech industry seem to revolve around the provisioning of hardware because buying software just isn't an appealing proposition to customers in most cases.
Sure, LLMs are interesting software, but they're a perfect demonstration: Open source LLMs already exist and gather huge momentum when released; the field is still so new that novel and efficient solutions are not the exclusive realm of proprietary research; and because of these factors, business models can't revolve around interesting model capabilities so much as provisioning the hardware they run on.
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#7Isn't it expected? With the high interest rates, how can insane valuations be kept? Also it means that ~15% of them still go public and that's good stats. Many others will just keep existing as going concerns, bringing profits to investors. In perverted mind of a VC that qualifies as failure, but it really isn't.
> In 2021 more than 354 companies received billion-dollar valuations, thus achieving unicorn status. Only six of them have since held IPOs.
That's 1.5% going public, not 15%.
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#8That is fine by me. What benefit have we gotten from these Unicorn other than enriching the founders and lenders. I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Do you think that LLMs are not a benefit? Smartphones? Electric cars?
No, I think there was little benefit besides overinflated tech salaries and founders cashing out in tech unicorns. Smartphones are products of Big Tech, EVs a handful of startups (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid).
Most recently, Silicon Valley is a grift ecosystem (fueled by zero interest rate policy) masquerading as innovation and a load bearing component of the economy. We can do without unicorns, the world will be better off for it (and legit value will need to be demonstrated vs fairy tale valuations).
(VC as an asset class has poor returns, VC funds make their fees throwing darts pretending to be thought leaders when it’s mostly luck, etc)
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#9That is fine by me. What benefit have we gotten from these Unicorn other than enriching the founders and lenders. I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Do you think that LLMs are not a benefit? Smartphones? Electric cars?
Those did not emerge from these unicorns, except maybe OpenAI. (Tesla was already public prior to this. Smartphones didn't come from a VC-backed startup.)
Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
#10That is fine by me. What benefit have we gotten from these Unicorn other than enriching the founders and lenders. I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Do you think that LLMs are not a benefit? Smartphones? Electric cars?
No, obviously not. Smartphones are a mixed blessing, I'm not sure we're better off with the little distraction machines, but both them and electric cars were things that could plausibly have developed more slowly, deliberately and thoughtfully over time without being "juiced" by distorted market incentives. They could have developed by companies simply evolving phones and cars over time.