291–300 of 1001 posts
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At least the European regulators are. Still waiting for US agencies to do their job...case in point: Intuit.
It seems like the common refrain is to blame Lina Kahn for conservatives stacking the courts against her since before she was born.
If you look at stats, it's about a 50-50 split in appointments between right vs. left.
Every time a merger fails, an angel gets its wings. Force megacorps to actually compete rather than just snapping up their potential competitors. Force startups to aspire to create an actual product rather than just manipulating the lizard-brain fears of irrational megacorp execs in the hopes of a payout.
I'm getting on to 10 years in the software industry as an engineer at the moment and in my view this is one of its most disappointing and frustrating aspects.
The whole software start-up scene just feels saturated with FIRE-obsessed individuals who prefer just about anything (money, vacation, travel, fame, ...) over company, product, real building, craftsmanship, etc.
I legitimately hear phrases like "5th time's the charm for an exit and payout!" way too often. It frequently just exacerbates the consolidation of technology, knowledge, wealth, and often hurts innovation, let alone can result in the solid team(s) of engineers left out to dry (although some can be also gunning for the payout in the end too).
In my view, there are just too many sell-outs pawning off solid products and teams to the highest bidder. I wish it wasn't that way.
Anyone else think this has nothing to do with the regulatory agencies but instead the market has dramatically shifted in the past 15 months in terms of valuations and this is a nice cover to cancel the deal? Figma still gets $1B "investment" without giving up any equity or control and Adobe gets to walk away from a massive $20B fee. Adobe makes $17B a year in revenue, they would need some pretty strong growth out of…
I strongly dislike Adobe’s “subscription only” business model, but it seems the market is telling them that subscriptions are a-OK: Adobe’s profits are very steady and are up 70+% in five years. [https://valustox.com/ADBE]
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And? Companies aren't allowed to make money anymore?
Total investment is around 350 million dollars. Adobe is paying 20 billion dollars. What company is making money in this? It is the investors that poured in 300+ million were going to have a massively inflated payback day, later compensated and loaded on to the backs of unsuspecting end users.
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Adobes cancellation practices are literally illegal in the Netherlands by the way. The deceptive trick of "pay monthly for a full year" and then hitting you with the cancellation fee is against local law. (It's called de wet van Dam for the curious.) You have to threaten their customer support with legal complaints to make them comply with it, it's super frustrating to deal with. They do fold immediately when you do…
I recommend using virtual credit cards for subscriptions. I just cancel the card if the account cancellation process is hostile in anyway.
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Except outlawing acquisitions by larger tech companies will absolutely reduce funding and incentives to start companies, and result in less products, less companies, and less competition.
I think this is net-negative for consumers, in a pretty significant way. If the most incentivised lifecycle is to seek VC investment to make a non-susitainable product in the hope of being acquired and swallowed into The Borg and shut down, we still end up with less good products. - Product life-cycles become short, consumers are weary of anything new. How many times have you seen product launches here on HN where th…
"Aim for the moon so if you miss you still end up amongst the stars."
The actual _goal_ is to be an independent successful company, but getting bought is the back up option that provides a safety net. If it was success-or-bust (no "-or-get-bought") the risk calculus would not make it worth it. It would make the American economy much more conservative and much more like Europe.
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No, because contract law is built for centuries past and lets Adobe screw you for trying this. Not sure if they do , but they definitely could . Back when communication latency was days or weeks, allowing sticky auto-renew that ignored payment failure and asked for a lot of heads up time on a cancellation made sense. It was exploitable, but it was worth it to buffer the latency. Now we don't have the latency, so it's…
I'm curious, what exactly are the ramifications of this "contract law" in the context of Adobe subscriptions? Adobe will sue you? Are they suing large amounts of customers?
This really makes me sad as an aspiring entrepreneur. What would be the use of starting a business if the government can arbitrarily block it from being acquired? I understand this happening in Europe but not America. I think America is going to lag behind in tech entrepreneurship just like Europe and I wonder what the next potential tech entrepreneurship hub will be.
The founder is still the CEO owning a majority of shares and his second and third in command (or their families) hold most of the remaining shares. He's getting close to retirement and probably will do so in a few years passing the torch on to his children.
AFAIK he came from a very upper middle class background but not real wealth and kept the company alive by being profitable (not Tech margins though). That seems to be a quite sustainable business model that made him, his cofounders wealthy enough to not worry about money even we'd close tomorrow.
Nothing wrong with that and certainly something an aspiring entrepreneur could aim for. It's more difficult though and you need to run a tight ship at times and actually think longterm and how to sustain your business.