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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#61

Post by schappim »

mezod wrote: post #37
schappim wrote: post #30

It is insane I have to say this, but this quite literally is the best time ever to start a startup. The sheer leverage that AI provides founders today is simply astounding. I have leveraged AI tools to build things I would never have been able to build just several years ago. The case in point would be it is now extremely easy to create Chrome plugins that automate aspects of my business simply by asking Claude to do…

great take, do you mind to elaborate on the last point? :)

By way of background, we sell STEM electronics hardware that has really low margin because it's designed to be excessively priced for education.

This need to be extremely efficient has caused us to do all sorts of things, like create shipping and fulfillment robots that pick products from the shelf and help our pickers and packers out[1].

I found that it's a lot harder to do things with atoms than just software. As a company, we have been able to automate a bunch of work that would have been previously done by an office admin. I believe this style of white-collar jobs is particularly vulnerable to automation.

I have two main concerns. One is that the folks with white-collar jobs that would buy our products will no longer have the economic means to do so. The second is, well, a lot of our products are STEM-based, and I'm worried that educators will no longer feel the need to teach coding and electronics, because in the future there may be the view that such work will simply be done by machines, and all what a student really needs to be able to learn to do is learn how to communicate in a clear manner using english...

1. https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-...

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#62

Post by consp »

ludwigvan wrote: post #36

Most engineers figured out that the options/stocks of startups are worthless.

And if they are not worthless in general, they are worthless for you since you will get squeezed out because funders and founders need to take everything since they are the only ones who matter or do any work (/s obviously).

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#63

Post by jcheng »

mittermayr wrote: post #26

I had one product that took off, made more money than at any of my previous (big-tech) jobs, and I thought the tales were true. If you work hard enough, catch a lucky wave and have the skills to ride it, you're free. The product peaked, and then very quickly dropped to zero in about two years, while I tried everything to prevent going out of business. Back at the bottom, a year or two of aimless wandering, I figured,…

It sounds like you were a bootstrapped solo founder in all of these cases? That’s the riskiest path, there are lots of other ways to navigate a career in startups that are not quite so brutal in odds or in emotional toll. (In the United States at least)

I have had a decently long career in startups (closing in on 30 years) and never once was a founder, in part because I always wanted to make a decent salary. Being an early employee at a decently funded startup has been a great tradeoff for me and my family. Even if all the equity over the years had amounted to nothing, I’d still have had few reasons to regret this path.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#66

Post by jparishy »

FWIW on HN circa 2012 when I joined, there were people I thought were biz heroes who posted here and that made the place feel smaller, and that dynamic is gone I think. I’m not sure it can be manufactured again either, in the age of personal brands

Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#67

Post by wslh »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #50

A few problems with this view: 1) Big corporations continue to struggle with doing in house innovation. Hiring more people doesn't seem to work. Just look at the infamously long and ever growing list of failed Google stuff. They are spending billions on this stuff. And most of it fails. Most large companies struggle with doing big new things in house. 2) There continue to be successful startups challenging/disrupting…

I don't see your points contradicts the article in any way, it describes more variables in the scenario. The problem is the scale and the darwinist concepts.

For example, while (1) is totally correct, you need ten of thousands of startups to have a few ones that are acquired by big companies. The need of big corps doesn't estimulate the creation of startups if incentives are not aligned.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#68

Post by whiplash451 »

Point 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.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#69

Post by [deleted] »

jajko wrote: post #39
benjaminwootton wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

If you were older, you would still consider current rates low and recent past an obscurity that couldn't last long. I can say that definitely about Europe, ie here in Switzerland interest rates used to be around 7% for quite some time and economy was doing fine, then it dropped to negative and afterwards people complained when they rose to 1-2%. 0.4% now, not complaining.

[deleted]
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