An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
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Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#2This is the final draft based on the original Hacker News thread and conversation about a month ago.
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#3Capital available in $200,000 chunks would be an interesting world:
1) You'd presumably want to make the offering mass-customizable, like a typical residential mortgage. There are a few levers to play with, sure, by 98% of the contract got vetted by the company lawyers once as being Good Enough and folks can take it or they can leave it. This allows you to close deals quickly, avoid spending much time teaching buyers about your process, and have the deals offered by junior staff. Most home buyers want a house, they don't want a mortgage. Most startup founders have a business to have a business, not to raise capital.
(Note that this would make "comparison shopping" easy.)
2) Automate and outsource more of the process. Banks can profitably do loans for $200,000 houses because there is an infrastructure of people who can say "Yep, this is a $200k house" and FICO scores, which let you push a button and get a quick estimate of my propensity to default in a second. I know we all think we're beautiful snowflakes, but I'm willing to bet there is a function which can be evaluated cheaply that is unfair, misses all sorts of edge cases, has numerous theoretical problems, and nonetheless is Good Enough when only $200k is at stake.
3) As you reduce the amount of marginal effort in each deal, it becomes possible to scale it to the moon, in a manner similar to e.g. mortgages and mutual funds. (The fund has a lot of money, the individual investors have comparitively little money and reduced exposure to any single investment, etc.)
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#4I read through the article but could not get the roots of "shrinking venture market" problem. Can someone please summarize/provide better explaination ?
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#5Capital available in $200,000 chunks would be an interesting world: 1) You'd presumably want to make the offering mass-customizable, like a typical residential mortgage. There are a few levers to play with, sure, by 98% of the contract got vetted by the company lawyers once as being Good Enough and folks can take it or they can leave it. This allows you to close deals quickly, avoid spending much time teaching buyers…
That's a truly fascinating take - making investment look more like home banking.
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#6"The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing – building for scale isn’t the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow."
This interestingly follows my own career growth. I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU for a long time, but eventually our bottleneck clearly shifted from reliability back to marketing/product development. Around that time I switched teams, and have since been the tech lead for our marketing team. It might sound less sexy to other engineers, but getting to be on the bleeding edge of marketing for virtual economies is constantly challenging and fun; especially with IMVU's data driven culture.
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#7"The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing – building for scale isn’t the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow." This interestingly follows my own career growth. I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU fo…
I can second that, particularly for IMVU. The economics in play there are deep and complicated on many levels.
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#8"The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing – building for scale isn’t the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow." This interestingly follows my own career growth. I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU fo…
I can second that, particularly for IMVU. The economics in play there are deep and complicated on many levels.
Yeah, here's a little known fact about IMVU's economy: Most products allow derivation, which gives content creators the ability to tweak/remix/reskin the product and publish the changes back to the catalog. Pick a markup for the remixed version and presto, everyone in the derivation chain gets paid their respective markups for every sale. There are only a handful of root nodes; nearly every product is a derivation of another product.
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can second that, particularly for IMVU. The economics in play there are deep and complicated on many levels.
Yeah, here's a little known fact about IMVU's economy: Most products allow derivation, which gives content creators the ability to tweak/remix/reskin the product and publish the changes back to the catalog. Pick a markup for the remixed version and presto, everyone in the derivation chain gets paid their respective markups for every sale. There are only a handful of root nodes; nearly every product is a derivation of…
Beyond the product side of the economy, which is fascinating to me in it's own right (for some of the reasons you mentioned), the service economy around room rental, sales positions for goods and modeling services are just as interesting as well (let alone the complications of exchange rate, credit inflation, and other economic concerns).
Re: An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK
#10"Technology, however, isn’t the driver any more for startups. The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing"
How true is this? Sounds like wishful thinking from a non programmer to me.
(Please note : I am not saying that marketing/product engineering is not important. They (obviously) are. I just think "Technology, however, isn’t the driver any more for startups" is too broad a brush)