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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

#11
post #4

That 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.

Yeah I don't think I can take much more disruption. I'd like some stability more than anything right now.

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#12

Maybe 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 ter…

[deleted]

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#13

Maybe 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 ter…

This comment should be its own HN post. For some reason it hit me like a ton of bricks. So true

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#15

Maybe 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 ter…

There are plenty of B2B opportunities where it just doesn't make sense for an open source competitor to emerge. There are plenty of hobbyist programmers willing to work on operating systems. Accounting systems? Way fewer. International export compliance? Zero.

There is plenty of opportunity in boring, unsexy niches. We have enough CRMs and Jira clones though.

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#16
post #5
post #4

That 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?

Electric cars, and to a more limited extent, smartphones are both beneficiaries of the development of batteries and rare earth magnets. Smartphones, from the dull but vital investment in wireless infrastructure. This also explains why the boom in e-bikes waited until the past few years, despite the level of demand that would have been obvious to anybody, and the minimal support tech needed to make them work.

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#17
post #5
post #4

That 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?

Smartphones at least are absolutely crippled by being locked down by user-hostile app stores and rent schemes. Instead of uplifting us, they've made us angry crackheads. I think the valley is a risk to humanity's survival at this point.

LLMs and electric cars simply have zero impact on my life, and I imagine that other people would have had few issues coming up with the latter.

Re: The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate

#18
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

>Smartphones didn't come from a VC-backed startup.

This isn't entirely correct: both Palm and Apple (the creators of the smart phone) were originally venture-backed.

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