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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#111

Post by hequmania »

Enterpreneurship is much more than just running a startup. You can build a product by bootstrapping it and start selling. You don't need to go all in from the very beginning, but you can build and try selling that. If it ever sticks, then you can go all in.

Also, you don't need to come up with something totally new that has never existed before. You can also build something that is already proven to have use for. Much easier to sell a little better or a little cheaper product to markets that exists instead of trying to create markets for something no-one has ever used before.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#112

Post by drc500free »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #12

Pretend all you want but interest rates make a ton of difference. If you can make a safe, compounded, perhaps leveraged 5% from treasuries the financial bar that a successful startup has to pass is so much higher

Absolutely, and in practice it's not a well analyzed spreadsheet problem with a smooth transition. The change in interest rates moved necessary payoffs from the "later" bucket to the "soon" bucket.

A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:

https://coldwaters.substack.com/p/the-mystery-box-is-out-of-...

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#113

Post by anovikov »

pjc50 wrote: post #57
anovikov wrote: post #31

It's more because people have realised that money is easier made outside of public space (crypto projects, scripts, other things that just extract money out of thin air) rather than by building something public that needs clients, investors, and exits. I have yet to meet a single startup billionaire but i already know at least one person who made 1B+ through scripting and several who are in 9 digit range. It's just e…

The secret ingredient is crime? (please explain "scripting" here, I don't think it means bash)

Well, there is no notion of crime if there is no actual personality involved. It's hard to define crime on a blockchain.

Scripting could be in rust of solidity for instance, but sometimes it's just python or literally bash.

Prime recent example: solana mods that improve voting. Before they stopped working (as too many people started using them), hundreds of millions were made by gaining advantage in attracting stake on staking pools by those who used them while others didn't - as they could consistently get better voting performance. And a mod was just a hundred or so lines in rust.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#114

Post by heisenbit »

A lot in tech is driven by technological hardware progress: Cpu‘s faster, storage faster and bigger, network pipes thicker and more ubiquitous, power requirements lower. This progress has slowed down in the past decades creating fewer opportunities to put incremental innovation on a self rising pedestal. Today‘s hyperconnected and more centralized global economy makes it even harder - there are fewer markets and medium to large sized buyers. AI has some advantages still on the scaling and basic hardware optimization side but even there it seems hard to monetize reliably innovation.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#117

Post by nejsjsjsbsb »

fxtentacle wrote: post #35
marcus_holmes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates. Trying to get back into a tech job and they all need Kubernetes experience because microservices. I've spent 10 years developing MVPs that never scaled past 100 users, let alone anywhere large enough to need K8s.

You'll fit in just fine. Most of the companies that want Kubernetes also never scaled past 100 users ;)

And the ones that did have a platform team, you just write code as if you are using a lambda or something anyway. Tend to your allotment of in-house yaml and off to the races! Unless you want to be on the k8s team. I wouldn't hate it personally.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#118

Post by flyinglizard »

wslh wrote: post #71
InkCanon wrote: post #59

On the last point: "The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find." It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was de…

The point is about a specific technology, like software, not technology at all. For example, we continue to use the same vehicles (e.g. cars) with a well known technology while SpaceX is advancing on sending rockets to the space. Technology is advancing but some technology is well known. This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business dev…

But while cars are a well known technology, the last 15 years have spawned a 1.3T company in that space - Tesla. There's room to innovate anywhere, maybe but the most basic commodities.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#119

Post by digitcatphd »

scarface_74 wrote: post #42
digitcatphd wrote: post #11

All of the arguments presented in this were equally true in 2013 as they are in 2025 and there are many more dimensions than you are taking into consideration. For instance, the demographics of HN users could have changed, or the economic climate is cyclically more defensive and 'risk off', which is well known. I suspect this is more related to economic cycles than a cultural paradigm shift and would suggest the auth…

In 2013, the Ponzi scheme of VC investing still existed. The VCs could pawn off their money losing companies to the public market, sell their equity fast and watch the stock either quickly decline or stay flat. The public got wise.

Economic cycles. As soon as the next cycle builds up momentum all the low risk entrepreneurs will rush in again.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#120

Post by myth2018 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #5

IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia. Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it. For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea ab…

> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns

That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.

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