41–50 of 220 posts
One of my favorite pg essays of all time. Loved this: "Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraisin…
One of my favorite pg essays of all time. Loved this: "Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraisin…
QTF. Reading this article made me smile.
pg makes his point clearly at the cost of oversimplifying his definition. Scalability is a continuum. There is a continuum between barbershop and search engine. VCs have every incentive to hit the far high end of the continuum. But a young, hungry entrepreneur probably gets higher expected value by not straying quite so far out.
What about in my case, where I run a free service that currently has served over 9.3 million requests in the last month? (That service is http://jsonip.com ) Its a utility service that a lot of people are finding useful and has a lot of traction, but no way that I can see to monetize it. Not even sure I have a desire to try and monetize it, since it costs me almost nothing to run. I would love to be able to build tha…
"It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist. I've long since gotten used to it. But it seems to bother a lot of people, particularly those who've started ordinary businesses. Many are annoyed that these so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them will amount to anything." I see so many comments on HN poking fun at VC backed startups with underdeveloped busine…
This is, to me, the most interesting thing here: I've seen lots of people talk about "traction", but this is the first time I've seen someone in the startup world give hard numbers for what a "good growth rate" is.
Another way to look at these numbers: A good growth rate during YC means that you're doubling every 10-14 weeks. An exceptional growth rate is doubling every 7 weeks, and if your doubling time is more than a year, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.
This fits pretty well with the rather imprecise commentary that "a startup measures the time to double in size in months, except for wildly successful ones, which measure it in weeks".
If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you'll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won't be many of them. It may not scale, but the chances of it making (any/more) money are much higher ("riches are in the niches") than a "fast startup" as it's very rare for a startup to grow fast and monetize quickly at the same time, because most people just won't buy immediately, someti…
It may not scale, but the chances of it making (any/more) money are much higher ("riches are in the niches") than a "fast startup" as it's very rare for a startup to grow fast and monetize quickly at the same time, because most people just won't buy immediately, sometimes even if it solves a problem for them. That is the exact point of the essay. An average niche business makes more money than an average startup, but…
Average is much higher than a median for startups because it includes the most successful startups which are by definition have a high growth rate over an extended period of time so they are very big.
Niche businesses in this context have a low growth so their average is closer to the median. The growth is constrained at the top in absolute terms (otherwise it would be a startup) so the average is lower than the one for startups.
This just emphasizes why I do not want to be a part of this scene.
As DHH says: fuck doing a startup.
I still think that for every serious genius, there are a lot of copycats. These copycats create this gigantic echo chamber of ideas. It's a ton of noise from a lot of likely failures. That noise can feel dishonest.
After reading this essay, I'm left with a sense that startup land is probably the best, dare I say more honest way, of turning investment money into new technology and jobs.
I'm actually left wondering about the relationship between "normal small businesses" and bankers. It feels adversarial in comparison.
One of my favorite pg essays of all time. Loved this: "Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraisin…
self-funding growth from profitability pretty much guarantees you are locked into a relatively slow growth rate That's an unwarranted assumption. Part of designing a startup business model is organizing growth so that you are unconstrained, so that more input produces greater output, earlier -- whether it's capital, users, employees, or support. All it takes is for one component of your business to not scale and you…