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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
421–430 of 431 posts
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#422> What's changed? Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much. But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of peopl…
I'm a startup founder doing startup right now. I'm experiencing burnout, by which I mean, after half a year of working 6-7 days a week 10-16 hours a day I really needed an 8 hour workday to get my focus back. Specially after working non stop for two weeks for a demo for McDonald's with only 6hrs sleep per night and then two devices fried because of a messed up 5v connection so we missed the demo. Went to bed at 20:30 today because the startup hustle is real. No rest for the .. startup founders.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interest rates are like a dial which turns economic activity up and down. I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild. A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold. It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I…
To really drive the nail in... consider what advances have been made in software over the past 30 years. In software specifically, NOT software enabled by faster hardware. What can we do now in software which would not have been possible in 1995, even if we were to somehow make our hardware today usable by programmers then?
I realize that you are asking a rhetorical question, as the answer is supposed to be a bit obvious and maybe even mind-blowing... but I actually struggle to come up with really good examples. Most of what I come up with are places where math struggled to keep up, notably in cryptography and consensus (and thereby, quite powerfully, in the intersection of these we have cryptocurrencies). Oh, here's one great such example: compression algorithms!!
However, the vast majority of the crazy things I feel like I'm able to do in software today aren't really because the software is--or even the protocols are--better, but that I'm capable of executing so many instructions in so little time on such vast quantities of stored data while communicating massive results over large distances reliably using computers that are so cheap and so small that virtually everyone in every financial class is surrounded by them.
Hell: even with large language models and the recent birth of working/useful AI, we are right on track for the timeline for progress along the road towards the singularity laid out in the late 1990s by Ray Kurtzweil, who was merely looking at computation per dollar, working off of the expectation that if the hardware can do it the software will figure it out. I could go back in time with the code for a modern LLM and I'd still have to wait for 2020 to deploy it.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#424IMHO 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…
So whats next?
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#425Obvious addition: 5. 1 != 6 I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013? If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of…
> A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. The problem typically is government regulations.
A modern airplane cannot be built on a bicycle shop budget, regardless of regulations in force.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean yeah kinda. But the skills for a startup map poorly to big companies. Startup: you look at something, plan, execute, learn skills as you go. Big company: here is x, do as I say. You must use these things from these teams, don't make it yourself. Coping with the step down in responsibility is hard. Going from owning the entire stack to not even having a real decision in planning is very hard to deal with, espec…
The mindset change isn’t that different. This is just part of the experience of growing and maturing in your career. I think people with startup backgrounds in big tech tend to hustle harder in their careers than people that were “born” in that environment.
I can see your point of view, but I gently disagree. This is based on my own experience.
Being able to see, react and change based on changing business goals was the key to my career success. Being able to talk to decision makers and get something in place to mitigate risk/take advantage is a key thing in buisness.
Going from being able to do that, to not even knowing what the business goals are, much less getting access to any kind of decision maker is a tough change. Its like having the scope of a CTO and then going to a scope of an intern. You feel infantalised.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#427Point 5: even if your startup exits successfully, the math of exits are brutal for employees (even early ones). Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios. Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.
I don't know anyone who took any significant pay cut for the expectation of future return. If you join startup for huge return as an employee in any case you are doing it wrong.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers. I started using this place a lot more in…
Relative out-timer here. I came here because of smart people having smart discussions about life, universe, and everything (tech or otherwise). HN both got me to drink the startup kool-aid early on, and then cured me from it later on, ultimately making me a startup-skeptic (and infecting me with an unhealthy dose of cynicism). I guess this is how growing up looks like :). Ultimately, I still hang around HN because of…
I was tempted to write much the same, then read yours, so I'll just say "me too, for everything you said" and leave it at that. :)
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#429Point 5: even if your startup exits successfully, the math of exits are brutal for employees (even early ones). Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios. Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.
I don't know anyone who took any significant pay cut for the expectation of future return. If you join startup for huge return as an employee in any case you are doing it wrong.
Expectations of a big return is absolutely a valid reason to join a startup. That’s the very definition of it actually.
Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anyone who took any significant pay cut for the expectation of future return. If you join startup for huge return as an employee in any case you are doing it wrong.
Expectations of a big return is absolutely a valid reason to join a startup. That’s the very definition of it actually.
No, that's why you have such expectation mismatch. No one should take any significant pay cut over market rate. In that way they aren't losing anything monetary.