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Making Startups Powerful
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Re: Making Startups Powerful
#22Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd. Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify. It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop…
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Re: Making Startups Powerful
#23PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked s…
What’s the solution
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Re: Making Startups Powerful
#24What are some recent powerful startups?
The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the solution
Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view.
In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now.
The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#26> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them. One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack. One good multi-regional partner and it could…
In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#27We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success.
Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#28I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
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Re: Making Startups Powerful
#29> Since startups make the best stuff, they're strongest on level playing fields. They're weakest in markets dominated by companies you'd describe as mafia. Record labels are mafia. PBMs are mafia. In these worlds you don't win by having the best product. Indeed you may only even exist for as long as the mafia chooses to allow you to. Which is not to say they can't be defeated. They probably can be, but you'd have to do it by coming in from the side — by somehow making them irrelevant, rather than by frontal attack. Then you wouldn't depend on beating them to succeed; it would be an ancillary benefit of winning in another dimension.
I think this is the strongest point being made here. It so accurately describes the situation in every category of software that it almost makes the rest of the post obsolete advice.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
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