91–100 of 324 posts
I stopped reading about 1/2 way into the article. Brace yourself, the rant is coming... Too many red flags springing from a delusional, narrow-minded view which looked no further than the bloated world of Valley startups. Hope mr. Author could cast his eye to some other corners of the world (no, even other parts of the States) and witness the bleak reality of a career called web development. Startups are just a small…
Most people simply fear us because of the way media portrays us as Zuckerberg, and our most persistent topic of discussion outside the GitHub world is Zuckerberg or surveillance, which is just another route to Zuckerberg.
Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…
>> If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for , which is what shareholders and VCs care about. There was an article on HN a day or two ago about ho…
If VCs were funding companies which made solid profits from customers and were therefore able to pay the VCs a multiple out of that profit I'd find this argument that money talks more convincing. As it is it seems that value for internet companies is not based on revenue or even potential revenue.
This disconnect between the money invested and the money earned completely breaks the connection you talk of - customers willing to put their money where their mouth is. Someone in the chain is paying lots of money, but it certainly isn't the actual end users or customers of most startups - often they run at a loss for a substantial period, and then they have no way to turn their free readers/users into paying ones in sufficient numbers to support their valuation or the money put in. VCs really don't care about that though, as long as they are paid more than they put in - that can easily happen if the companies are bought by larger corporations like IBM or Yahoo in the mistaken belief that the customers can be converted - the question of revenue then becomes academic as the companies are folded into a larger parent and the actual value impossible to discern.
It's an interesting time to be alive and an interesting market to be working in, but I do find the distortions created by massively inflated valuations and companies built just to be sold on worrying. Forgive me though, I must stop wittering on HN and get back to work now :)
I think the real issue is that there's people with lots of money that are willing to fund a lot of different companies in the hope of stumbling across the next facebook. Result? A whole host of well funded but ultimately useless apps and websites. Meanwhile, the people who can make these websites are making lots of money. It's probably a bubble to some extent. Eventually, if the return from all these web apps is less…
I don't hear anyone saying - don't bother making a smartphone unless you are Apple or Samsung (of course this might have been Motorola or Nokia in the past :-) )
Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…
>> If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for , which is what shareholders and VCs care about. There was an article on HN a day or two ago about ho…
> There was an article on HN a day or two ago about
> how asking people to bet on political propositions
> affects their stated beliefs ...
I stopped reading about 1/2 way into the article. Brace yourself, the rant is coming... Too many red flags springing from a delusional, narrow-minded view which looked no further than the bloated world of Valley startups. Hope mr. Author could cast his eye to some other corners of the world (no, even other parts of the States) and witness the bleak reality of a career called web development. Startups are just a small…