Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
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Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#2There are a ton of small firms that are new, lean, and operate primarily via websites. I think a lot of them are totally oblivious/unconcerned about the start up tech scene. They are primarily concerned with running profitable businesses.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#3Small online business owner here, chiming in.
I believe the overuse of the word startup comes from a certain kind of pretentiousness, a want to associate one's own small-business, small-market, technically trivial, mom-and-pop online business with world leaders like Facebook and Google. Making the linguistic link is good for the founder's ego, and even better for convincing naïve investors to fund barely viable visions.
If you're one of the many non-technical teams who cannot build products yourselves and have an idea with dubious money-making prospects then you can have a great adventure on half a million euro of dumb money, and believe me many founders in Berlin are.
I've lived in Berlin since January and during that time I witnessed a rising hipster startup culture. Unskilled and unexperienced college graduates with big egos raise dumb money, hire programmers to build code they don't understand, then spend their days 'networking' at trendy hotels in down-town, throwing minimal techno parties and going on trips across Europe for 'business and pleasure'. It's a great lifestyle, and I've nothing against people enjoying themselves - it's certainly my priority now. But I find this sort of carry on repugnant when an investor's money is at stake.
Viaweb was founded by PHD students at MIT, one who invented the worm and the other who wrote timeless Common Lisp textbooks. The modern waterfall of self-professed 'startups' are run by guys and girls who watched 'How to Build a Blog in 15 minutes using Rails' then decided they were the next Steve Jobs. Let's get realistic here - building a web app or an Iphone app these days is no more high-tech than a mechanic fixing your broken car.
Drop the ego, drop the pretense - the majority of business now labelled as startups are small online businesses and there's nothing wrong with that.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#4Small online business owner here, chiming in. I believe the overuse of the word startup comes from a certain kind of pretentiousness, a want to associate one's own small-business, small-market, technically trivial, mom-and-pop online business with world leaders like Facebook and Google. Making the linguistic link is good for the founder's ego, and even better for convincing naïve investors to fund barely viable visio…
I can back Jack in saying the Berlin startup culture is vommit-inducing.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#5Anyone else tired of all these entrepreneur/startup blogs and articles? It's a bubble in itself.
Now I skip past them like I skip tabloid and gossip "articles".
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#6Anyone else tired of all these entrepreneur/startup blogs and articles? It's a bubble in itself. Now I skip past them like I skip tabloid and gossip "articles".
You have to understand, before it was called "Hacker News", this was "Startup News". A heavy focus on startup culture and entrepreneurship is a part of the DNA of this site. I expect it will always be that way. Complaining about startup / entrepreneur articles here is almost akin to getting in the water and then complaining that you got wet.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#7Small online business owner here, chiming in. I believe the overuse of the word startup comes from a certain kind of pretentiousness, a want to associate one's own small-business, small-market, technically trivial, mom-and-pop online business with world leaders like Facebook and Google. Making the linguistic link is good for the founder's ego, and even better for convincing naïve investors to fund barely viable visio…
"Viacom was founded by PHD students at MIT..."
Wasn't it Viaweb? Big difference between Viacom (the media conglomerate) and Viaweb, the online shop software.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#8In between all that succeeding and failing were a large number of businesses who didn’t really know what they were doing yet or how they would do that thing profitably. So, weren’t really businesses in the traditional sense and we needed a new word with which to call them.
cheap to scale > scale per se > scale potential
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#9Anyone else tired of all these entrepreneur/startup blogs and articles? It's a bubble in itself. Now I skip past them like I skip tabloid and gossip "articles".
You have to understand, before it was called "Hacker News", this was "Startup News". A heavy focus on startup culture and entrepreneurship is a part of the DNA of this site. I expect it will always be that way. Complaining about startup / entrepreneur articles here is almost akin to getting in the water and then complaining that you got wet.
Funny that a lot of articles here wouldn't really be categorized as "hacker" news :)
Lately, everything is "hacking". Seems like the word lost its meaning.
Re: Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it
#10I just blogged about something similar today called the Failure Fallacy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444523).
We are making it hard on ourselves to be successful because of the ideas and types of businesses we are drawn to create.
We jump into crazy ideas with no provable business model or customer when we could experiment and apply customer validation to our potential product. Jumping in like a crazy person is glorified in our community because we love watching others do wild things and hope it will help us be more wild.
I want this to change. More people should be running successful businesses, though they might not be instagrams. I want to see your unique touch on so many tired products and ideas.