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The golden era of being an open startup is gone

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Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#41

Post by constantly »

Running a business openly seems to me to be what people do when they are Amazon sellers and discover a brand-new, lucrative niche before Amazon (or dozens of Chinese sellers) steal it and start selling it for themselves. Running a startup publicly, in my opinion, essentially validates ideas for others to do better, with more resources, with a competitive edge, or whatever.

This was demonstrated lately using the AI Stable Diffusion Portraits. A thousand rivals arose right away after the original author stated their money was derived from doing nothing more than setting up a website connected to steady dissemination on the backend. It increases competition even if none of those rivals are inherently superior.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#42

Post by inasio »

A startup I knew had someone take professional-looking pictures of new employees, and add them to the Who Works Here page, with a nice blurb. After years of employees being poached by Big Tech the Who Works Here page is gone. To me this is also part of the loss of innocence.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#43

Post by mbesto »

The trend outlined in the article is that startups tend to ditch openness once they mature. I think the explanation is pretty simple - it's no longer a marketing advantage to do so. If your'e selling to a startup audience then being open gets you eyeballs early on in your career. Once you start moving into more mature markets, this becomes less interesting to those audiences so why do it? It's hard enough to be open within a company, I can't imagine the operational overhead to do this externally.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#44

Post by schnebbau »

joelfried wrote: post #37
sergiomattei wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter?

Of course it matters when you attempt to use your own social backing to boost someone else. That you're a commenter who has been around since 2018 who is also an "an ambitious full-stack software engineer, with a deep passion for design, user interface and front-end engineering"[1] is definitely a point in your favor, though. What made you personally feel so strongly about the original author? Your reasoning is more…

Who are you to make those kinds of statements?

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#45

Post by shortstuffsushi »

reidjs wrote: post #2

I don't really agree or maybe I have misunderstood the author's thesis here. Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by building in the open nowadays because so many people have already done it, so now consumers are weary of it? Or is he upset that many of these companies that were once open have stopped being open once they found success? Just because many established companies have stopped doing it, doesn't mea…

I am also a bit confused by some of what the author has said here. On the one hand he talks about not disclosing things because others are ripping off designs, etc, but in other places he's referring to things like employee salaries and run-rates, etc.

Maybe I'm dumb and not connecting the dots, but why would sharing things like your costs allow others to steal your business? I genuinely don't understand this, so I think I'm misreading the article.

> From envy and toxic feelings dividing teams and friends to businesses copying other businesses completely, the scene is getting spotted by more and more cases.

The first part of this reads like the traditional reason that "don't talk about your salary with other employees" was a commonly accepted thing. Is the author (/community at large) deciding that going the other direction is a bad idea?

Maybe someone can TL;DR in a better way to save my Friday fried brain?

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#46

Post by [deleted] »

safety1st wrote: post #22
reidjs wrote: post #2

I don't really agree or maybe I have misunderstood the author's thesis here. Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by building in the open nowadays because so many people have already done it, so now consumers are weary of it? Or is he upset that many of these companies that were once open have stopped being open once they found success? Just because many established companies have stopped doing it, doesn't mea…

This Damon Chen guy seems like a nice guy but like an independent journalist or something. He seems like he could be a great evangelist. He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because the age of Open Startups is over. I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to work at j…

[deleted]

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#47

Post by [deleted] »

xyzelement wrote: post #11

The world is a competitive place and we are seeing some folks lose their innocence. If what you are doing is a real business, then given the choice to protect your business or aspiring to be "open" (but with no benefit, just risk") - you focus on the business. It's really no different than releasing too much of your secret sauce as open source - can only hurt you and is a sign you aren't that mature about what runnin…

[deleted]

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#48

Post by UncleEntity »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4
reidjs wrote: post #2

I don't really agree or maybe I have misunderstood the author's thesis here. Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by building in the open nowadays because so many people have already done it, so now consumers are weary of it? Or is he upset that many of these companies that were once open have stopped being open once they found success? Just because many established companies have stopped doing it, doesn't mea…

I think you've hit on some of the issues. One of the challenges is that it is hard to know what the company was getting out of being open. That is hard because there is what folks say, and there is what they really think, and in the startup business the gap between those two realities can be really big. Also, the most successful startup CEOs seem to be really good at crafting a narrative out of very cherry picked "fa…

> Of course a certain level of disclosure is required by the SEC if you want to be traded publicly…

This is what I find confusing, there isn’t some magic switch that gets pulled when you are required to disclose financials which protects you from the downsides to being open.

If your product can be trivially copied, like an AI email writer, I’m going to guess the problem wasn’t how open you were during the development process. Everyone has come out with their own “Do X with AI” at this point with zero hope to monetize beyond charging for compute time as the market is fully saturated.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#49

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

mbesto wrote: post #43

The trend outlined in the article is that startups tend to ditch openness once they mature. I think the explanation is pretty simple - it's no longer a marketing advantage to do so. If your'e selling to a startup audience then being open gets you eyeballs early on in your career. Once you start moving into more mature markets, this becomes less interesting to those audiences so why do it? It's hard enough to be open…

A reason to keep doing it is to maintain the value of openness within the internal culture through praxis. If it was only being done for marketing purposes, then it wasn't ever a value, but a strategy.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#50

Post by crabmusket »

UncleEntity wrote: post #48
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've hit on some of the issues. One of the challenges is that it is hard to know what the company was getting out of being open. That is hard because there is what folks say, and there is what they really think, and in the startup business the gap between those two realities can be really big. Also, the most successful startup CEOs seem to be really good at crafting a narrative out of very cherry picked "fa…

> Of course a certain level of disclosure is required by the SEC if you want to be traded publicly… This is what I find confusing, there isn’t some magic switch that gets pulled when you are required to disclose financials which protects you from the downsides to being open. If your product can be trivially copied, like an AI email writer, I’m going to guess the problem wasn’t how open you were during the development…

Exactly. Competition is a fact of business, and while the example in the article was pretty egregious (launch tweet was identical down to the placement of emojis), it's going to be hard to succeed if you can't take those lemons and turn them into product differentiation lemonade.
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