201–210 of 264 posts
Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually…
Sounds like a win for you.
I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders. One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation. You _hav…
Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations mean that it’s very different than say, B2B SaaS.
The article somehow states that money from private equity and venture capital is poison that will kill new companies and harm the public. I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't d…
> I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed. Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (…
What if you and the venture capitalists are on the same page and have the same goals?
Or what if you keep control, have a good money making plan and you don't ask for funding just to pay expenses and acquire unpaying users but use those funds for growth?
No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that. This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as t…
Ditto. Retrospectively it seems a fiasco from the start. I wonder why investors bought it and Talenthouse.
Maybe investors in the first round were hoping to find some suckers in the future and offload the "business" to them.
But what about the final buyers? Didn't they smell anything wrong? You got to ask how did they make the money they lost on Elo / Talenthouse in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed. Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (…
>Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (you wanted to build) straight up impossible. What if you and the venture capitalists are on the same page and have the same goals? Or what if you keep control, have a good money making plan and you don't ask for funding just to pay expenses and acquire unpaying users but use those funds for growth?
No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that. This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as t…
I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expert…
Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.
Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit Corporation and took $8m in funding.
I mean Bluesky is founded by Jack Dorsey, who made a fortune for shareholders with his last social media company by conning an idiot into paying way above market value for it. Of course it'll be hard to make that particular lightning bolt strike twice, but it's not like he doesn't have a good track record.
That idiot, how you call him, bought the user base and the market position of Twitter. Either he has a plan to make it profitable or he doesn't care, as long as he doesn't loose too much money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays. Most successful founders, from Edison to Gates and Bezos went in the business to make money, not to change the world. Changing the world for better or for worse is mostly a side effect. The goal of a business is profit, not ideology.
You’re all over this thread but I think you need to read it a bit more carefully. There’s no reference to any belief system in the post you’re replying to, there’s an assertion about expected profit and control. You can disagree with that assertion, and indeed have on another thread, but within the context of the assertion the poster is correct. I think you’re wrong to even think this is about “ideology”, which is pr…
That's how I read it and you have the right to disagree. That's why we are on a discussion forum. To share ideas and speak our minds freely, regardless if we agree or not.
I hope you have fun tracking and counting my posts and it represents a good spending of your time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expert…
Can you give us examples of such startups? Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.