61–70 of 255 posts
Makes me wonder what kind of “advice” they were giving before: you should be replacing underperforming employees at any stage of a business cycle.
This post reminded me a little of my real estate agent's newsletter: 2007: There's never been a better time to buy! 2008: There's never been a better time to buy! 2012: There's never been a better time to buy! 2020: There's never been a better time to buy! 2022: There's never been a better time to buy!
Recessions are good times to take risks since people are afraid and while capital isn’t cheap this time around, assets are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I was super confused by this. VCs generally don’t have all the money ready to invest. They may have raised a $300 mil fund but they don’t get that money until they call it in. If the LP says “no deals for 6 months” that’s how it is.
If the LPs don’t meet the capital calls, they’re in breach of their investor agreement, and the penalties are generally quite harsh, including potentially forfeiting a lot of the value they currently have in the fund.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Driver fees are already so low that between depreciation, gas, and your time, you're barely making ends meet driving. They can't squeeze the drivers any further, unless they only want people to be driving 15-year-old beaters.
Boy, this is an evergreen narrative on HN, but I don't really think it's true. The total all-in cost of a Prius (depreciation, maintenance, gasoline, etc...) is about 30 cents per mile. Uber drivers make about $1-$2 per mile which is a pretty big margin. Uber has been around for over 10 years now. Sure, not everyone is an accountant, but if Uber drained every driver's wallet, they'd have noticed by now. Interesting t…
> In contrast with the scenario in 2000, most of today’s tech companies are real businesses. How many of today's startups are just servicing each other with VC money? This isn't meant to be flippant - I'm genuinely curious (and while I bet it's a lot, I am skeptical it is overwhelming). I mean if we really look at some of the business models for these companies, they're clearly unsustainable. Uber is a prime example…
Have you actually studied Uber’s recent earnings? I’m pretty sure rideshate contribution margin is positive in all their tenured markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd disagree re: Figma and Notion. These are very sticky, best-in-class tools which have a lot of use outside of "VC-land". Figma is becoming the de-facto way to share designs across the internet. Notion has a good shot at becoming the internet's default business wiki, killing Confluence.
Figma's incredibly hard to replace because its tools are highly customized for specific design workflows. Notion, I'm not nearly as sure about. With Google Workplace having pageless Google Docs now, and other shops having content centralized on Office 365, a lot of cost-cutting companies will ask "we just use Notion for a wiki anyways, can we migrate over to the system we're already paying for?" And sure, Notion is m…
Maybe, anyway
> In contrast with the scenario in 2000, most of today’s tech companies are real businesses. How many of today's startups are just servicing each other with VC money? This isn't meant to be flippant - I'm genuinely curious (and while I bet it's a lot, I am skeptical it is overwhelming). I mean if we really look at some of the business models for these companies, they're clearly unsustainable. Uber is a prime example…
IMHO this is mostly the a phenomenon of the SAAS/platform space. Those practices don’t really apply to more traditional businesses (including high tech ones).
But you made me think of something else: this phenomenon was definitely booming in the 2000 crash, when net-related hardware companies were underwriting their own sales, which ended quite poorly. Not only is the subsidization you point out happening elsewhere, but hardly anyone buys much “networking gear” any more. From crucial, enabling tech to boring infrastructure in what, 15 years?
(Context: I'm a VC) Some great points in the post, but I also see a few additional dynamics at play: 1) The last 10 years have been great for VCs and startups, but now VCs are thinking about how to make their funds last longer. Two reasons for this: first, time diversification matters. If you think markets might go down even more, you don't want to deploy the rest of your fund quickly, you want to spread it out over…
are these US or EU observations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, crypto and fintech will be the first dominos to fall - they’re in free fall already. There’s a lot of copycat B2B startups that extremely dependent on crypto and fintech for their revenue. They will be the next domino to fall. After that, it would be infrastructure, security, and analytics vendors that will face a revenue crunch and will be unable to raise another round of funding. And then, all the startups…
What can we do to insulate ourselves from this? As a software engineer at a startup
> In contrast with the scenario in 2000, most of today’s tech companies are real businesses. How many of today's startups are just servicing each other with VC money? This isn't meant to be flippant - I'm genuinely curious (and while I bet it's a lot, I am skeptical it is overwhelming). I mean if we really look at some of the business models for these companies, they're clearly unsustainable. Uber is a prime example…
> If your unit economics don't work then you're fucked... From the company's perspective that's certainly true. As a regular person I'm more worried about the companies whose unit economics work too well. Companies like Amazon have so much momentum that it seems like they could go on indefinitely, instead of eventually failing and making room for new entrants. Companies whose unit economics don't work transfer wealth…
once your business becomes everyone's business, they'll just go ahead and make decisions about it without you