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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

dylanhuang.com

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#181

Post by modriano »

ccppurcell wrote: post #143
fourseventy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you use an iPhone to type this?

Everything apart from the look of the iPhone is value created by publicly funded organisations, with the exception of the transistor which was developed by at&t. And at&t were effectively a government sponsored monopoly at the time. So apple extracted value, I would argue.

Wild.

I can't think of any companies that were more product-focused than Steve Jobs' Apple. They created so much value across so many industries. They created so many transformational products.

Their machines in the 1980s revolutionized personal computing (eg they brought GUIs and the mouse to the world). The iPod let us carry thousands of songs, audiobooks, or podcasts in our pocket. iTunes changed the music industry, giving us an easy way to get the music we wanted without piracy. The iPhone put the Internet in every pocket. Honorable tangential mention: Pixar transformed kids movies and dethroned Disney.

Apple made a ton of money making products that were delightful to use that users happily pay a massive premium for. They made things that were so much more than the sum of their parts.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#182

Post by robertlagrant »

realce wrote: post #180
robertlagrant wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of this is the case, and you haven't really said why. Focusing on winning big is absolutely not survivorship bias. Everyone in the 100m is aiming to be the fastest human on earth, but only one will win. That's not survivorship bias. Throwing fallacy names as insults is still just insults.

The 100m is not a sustainable model for a nation or world's economy. Everyone needs to eat, not just the single individual who runs fastest.

That doesn't seem in any way relevant to the point about survivorship bias. Nor to the US, whose system has if anything produced far too much food for its citizens.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#183

Post by anonu »

gkoberger wrote: post #49

Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things.…

You might have been successful, compared to konfig, because it looks like you had an 8-year headstart. It could be that konfig was a fine idea and well executed, just not at the right time.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#184

Post by kandesbunzler »

bigfudge wrote: post #157
dagw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

>Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US

You think it's better in Europe? Here in germany everything is going downhill fast

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#185

Post by cushychicken »

jajko wrote: post #153
cushychicken wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US they may very well think of that as failure, especially if they are VC funded Man, if anything, this is the part that’s weird. There’s this very weird undercurrent of keeping track of who is “winning” in the US. Is it not possible that someone who shepherds a hypergrowth startup to IPO, is just as of much a winner as the bootstrapped founder who has a profitable, sustainable business with a handful of emp…

People chasing such carrots on sticks are not healthy, happy nor balanced individuals. Every single one of them has something fundamentally broken deep inside, unquenchable thirst to over-compensate for that itch, which can manifest ie as greed. In most cases in fact its just broken childhood mostly via broken father figure, source of eternal income for most psychologists since those issues are not actually fully fix…

I think you have a kernel of insight in this take, but I have to be frank: I really don’t think you frame this or phrase it in a very kind or generous way.

I say this as someone who has personally experienced the kind of struggles you talk about in such unflattering terms. (I lost my dad to heart failure at age 7, and have struggled with major depression for most of my adult life.)

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#186

Post by anonu »

codingdave wrote: post #4

This is not the first story I've heard of a product that isn't quite right, but when deciding where to pivot, fell into AI as the answer and then failed. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - when we figure out what AI is good at and what it is not, we will start treating it as a tool instead of a goal, and our product ideation will stabilize.

The concept of an API should go away and we should just have AI's talk to each other in plain language.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#187

Post by dboreham »

deadbabe wrote: post #48

Has there ever been a scenario where someone gave up on a startup, dumped the code, then someone picked it up and turned it into a successful business?

There are some legal risks with this. Having an OSS license from the copyright holder to use the code is not the same as being the copyright holder.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#188

Post by [deleted] »

bigfudge wrote: post #157
dagw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

[deleted]

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#189

Post by lotsofpulp »

meiraleal wrote: post #165
bigfudge wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

> we need big companies to make GPUs, probably. we definitely don't need trillion dollar companies selling ads.

But we do want them considering our hesitation at paying for things without ads, especially when a free gmail, google maps, google drive, etc is available.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#190

Post by lysecret »

Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

If you take vc money that’s the deal.
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