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The Next Generation Bends Over
81–90 of 216 posts
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
Most of your blog posts strike me as you rationalizing why you aren't a hugely profitable company.
I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way.
No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appreciate their general angle.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#83I don't know anything about Intuit's history, management structure, internal bureaucracy, vision, or product direction, so it's hard for me to say anything critical about this post in any level of detail.
In general, though, I would point to something that ought to strike anyone with an outside angle on the culture and worldview pervading the tech startup community and much of small business: there is a rather Messianic complex of exceptionalism, particularly with innovation.
While it is certainly true that large companies necessarily homogenize business processes and impart well-known characteristics of "mediocrity," that's exactly what they do best: optimise for profitability. Large organisations are very good at extracting value from existing things. They are also the only ones with the capital to bring many innovations from an incipient level to mass-market; that's a large-scale, and very capital-intensive endeavour.
I think startups often like to imagine themselves leaders in innovation due to hypothetically negligible distribution and replication cost structure introduced by the Internet, but that's a silly thing to extrapolate to a universal. It really depends on what the product is, and certainly on the nature of the innovation. There are a lot of modern conveniences, well-known products, appliances, brands, etc. that would have never seen the light of day - in a household name sort of sense - if they had been left in the stewardship of the original creators. It takes a lot of money - and, indeed, a lot of thankless, cheerless, rather bland and unremarkable process development and management - to get the escape velocity.
My point is that without knowing more about Intuit, I am not convinced, ipso facto, that Mint is going to die a mediocre, bromidic megacorporate death simply because it was acquired by a much, much larger company. That doesn't necessarily follow. That it will undergo considerable change and adaptation to the business imperatives of the acquirer is almost certain, but whether that will turn out to be utterly horrible or something quite pleasant depends on the quality of the acquirer, not the mere fact of the acquisition.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
Most of your blog posts strike me as you rationalizing why you aren't a hugely profitable company.
Alright, so Jason's post was a bit more vitriolic than it needed to be, but I don't see how this contributes meaningfully to the conversation except as a cheap-shot to attempt to discredit Jason.
You seem to assume that being a hugely profitable company is the right thing to be, and that anyone who isn't is bitter and requires a outlet to vent about how their failure isn't their own fault.
What I've seen 37Signals blog posts advocating is building a business such that it is enjoyable enough to run that it doesn't matter if it has a potential multi-million dollar exit. There is nothing wrong with them advocating such a philosophy, and nothing wrong with running a company that holds to such a policy provided no one involved was bullshitted about the terms.
The terms that Mint was running on are different, though, partly because there are investors and founders involved who entered into the deal expecting a profitable exit. Nailing them to a cross makes no sense, because their goals weren't the same, nor do I think they were ethically compelled to be.
But please, let's not make this conversation about flinging one line barbs at Jason and 37Signals so they can send one line barbs flying back. All that does is raise the heat level in the room.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of your blog posts strike me as you rationalizing why you aren't a hugely profitable company.
I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way. No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appre…
On the other hand, the Mint guys worked for 3 years, earned $170m, and now they can 'enjoy building things they like, their way', for a long ass time without needing to answer to anybody except people who use their product.
I'm not sure what's not to like about that. The real question is about what those 3 years were like. If they kind of enjoyed them, that's just gravy.
(Of course, I'm aware of Survivor's Bias here. Not everyone gets bought for $170m.)
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of your blog posts strike me as you rationalizing why you aren't a hugely profitable company.
I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way. No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appre…
I get that. Really, I do. But they keep saying it over and over again in a public forum. Who are they trying to convince: the reader, or themselves?
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#87Please. $170 million is "fuck you" money. Aaron and I'm guessing many of the top founders/executives made enough money to never ever have to work again. Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. They can do anything they want...for profit, not for profit, TBD (Y Combinator). This wasn't some BS talent acquisition; this was an absolute shitloa…
"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
What would have happened if Mint had said no, and then Intuit made a bigger offer to Wesabe (and they accepted)? People who were already used to using Intuit products might be tempted to try out Wesabe instead of Mint, making it that much harder for Mint to convince such users to give them a try.
That's not to say Mint did any of us a favor by accepting Intuit's offer, but their decision may not have come as easily as you think.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#88Please. $170 million is "fuck you" money. Aaron and I'm guessing many of the top founders/executives made enough money to never ever have to work again. Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. They can do anything they want...for profit, not for profit, TBD (Y Combinator). This wasn't some BS talent acquisition; this was an absolute shitloa…
It is sort of fuck you money, but honestly I'm more pissed off that a shitty company now owns one of my favorite webapps. Mint is now going to die. I also think something must have been going terribly wrong. The exit was tiny considering the huge amount of money that was invested.
For me, 10 million dollars would be enough to satisfy all of my personal and family needs: house, vacation money, pay off close friends' debts, tuition, health insurance, etc. More money just means more good that can be done in the world for my larger human family.
Also, it is likely that nothing was going terribly wrong. The exit was only small for the later-round investors, who also made a killing on their investment, though not as extreme as the earliest investors.
A company should always have a sell price. Intuit met Mint's.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way. No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appre…
On the other hand, the Mint guys worked for 3 years, earned $170m, and now they can 'enjoy building things they like, their way', for a long ass time without needing to answer to anybody except people who use their product. I'm not sure what's not to like about that. The real question is about what those 3 years were like. If they kind of enjoyed them, that's just gravy. (Of course, I'm aware of Survivor's Bias here.…
No argument with that. I was just offering a way to look at the "shut up, you've just got sour grapes because you're not making loads of moolah!" line.
Re: The Next Generation Bends Over
#90From a comment posted on the blog: "You may not realize how fragile Mint was. All the hard part was being done by Yodlee.com; Mint simply built a thin layer over Yodlee, and collected affiliate fees. Mint was not built for the long haul, it was built to flip. (Check out the free yodlee.com to see that this is true.)" I think this point is important. Mint was adding value to an existing set of services rather than cre…
Wow, shocking. I can't believe Intuit would pay $170 million for something that has a single point of failure.
Wonder how much those access rates are going up :-)