The Era of Startups Is Over
acecreamu.substack.com
The Era of Startups Is Over
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#2Contrariwise, it's never been easier to bootstrap a solo or Given the profound malinvestment and market distortions groups like SoftBank/WeWork and FTX/Theranos/AirBnB/A16Z have created I frankly say good riddance.
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#3Contrariwise, it's never been easier to bootstrap a solo or Given the profound malinvestment and market distortions groups like SoftBank/WeWork and FTX/Theranos/AirBnB/A16Z have created I frankly say good riddance.
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Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#4Contrariwise, it's never been easier to bootstrap a solo or Given the profound malinvestment and market distortions groups like SoftBank/WeWork and FTX/Theranos/AirBnB/A16Z have created I frankly say good riddance.
I ve been bootstrapping a one-man tech company my self, and with 100usd/month I have the following facilities: managed db with weekly backups, managed kubernetes with autoscaling(DO), ci/cd (GitHub + self hosted runners), VPN meshing (tailscale), and a bunch of other open source tools (airflow, selenium, etc). This would have required an entire IT department only 5-7 years ago
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#5Contrariwise, it's never been easier to bootstrap a solo or Given the profound malinvestment and market distortions groups like SoftBank/WeWork and FTX/Theranos/AirBnB/A16Z have created I frankly say good riddance.
Someone asked why it was easier but deleted their comment while I was replying.
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Shopify is all in one for many business, contrast that to 10-20 years ago where you had to build the entire storefront. There are several ways to accept online payments, the easiest by far being apple/google in-app.
Amazon fulfilment services mean you can skip on logistics (if you're a PHY company). Customers are used to buying things online now, everyone has a phone of some kind so you have an app channel you never had before...
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#6The era of startups isn't over. The era of low quality startups certainly is though, which is basically the point this article makes at the end among the general doomery. This in my opinion, is great news.
Being a startup can be conceived of as one possible path taken as an early phase in the business cycle, hard to see that changing. What is changing is now you have to be more realistic about justifying to others that you can be quickly scaled for a return. You need to have high natural growth underlined by great unit economics and the right plan to utilize capital to super charge that. Free money just meant wider bounds to take risks, which in a lot of cases turned into mediocre business. This is bad for everyone involved, VC down to consumer.
You now need to be more realistic about what is a lifestyle business or something that can be bootstrapped into a solid medium sized business through slow methodical growth instead of taking capital, flailing, reducing the product quality in a bid to survive, harm consumers and then dying anyway.
What I think this does harm unfortunately are moonshots, now you'll need to be even closer to some idealized SaaS with easily digestible metrics and plans to get funding. I imagine it's very very hard to separate a true moonshot that will succeed and revolutionize vs bunk and the risk profile has changed a lot, and quickly.
As a side note I also hope this reduces startup solely as a vehicle to acquisition and restores some novel public companies being created.
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#7The headline and article are unnecessarily hyperbolic. It’s not “over” but yes if you’re trying to found a startup with a high burn rate and little prospects to be unit economics positive it’s going to be a rough ride. For new startups the bad ideas will just get filtered out earlier and not get funded. The ones that will have the most pain are later stage startups funded during period of excess that now have little future prospects and with no chance of raising the funds they need to keep going. Thats where we’ll see fire sale acqu-hire M&A activity or just flat out implosions.
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#8That's just an intro. I was expecting to scroll down to graphs of startup rates and VC returns. But no. He just makes the statement with no backup.
So, is this a legit claim?
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#9Contrariwise, it's never been easier to bootstrap a solo or Given the profound malinvestment and market distortions groups like SoftBank/WeWork and FTX/Theranos/AirBnB/A16Z have created I frankly say good riddance.
I ve been bootstrapping a one-man tech company my self, and with 100usd/month I have the following facilities: managed db with weekly backups, managed kubernetes with autoscaling(DO), ci/cd (GitHub + self hosted runners), VPN meshing (tailscale), and a bunch of other open source tools (airflow, selenium, etc). This would have required an entire IT department only 5-7 years ago
If it's easy for you, it's easy for your competitors too. IMHO, how easy it is to start a startup is dictated by the competition, not the accessibility of the underlying technology. The tech is always the state of the art at the current time. But that doesn't have any bearing on markets, resources, hiring, etc.
Re: The Era of Startups Is Over
#10I think you are confusing the era of startups with the era of VC bubble/ponzi economy.
Startups are a symptom of technology advancing, the basic human psychology of desired progress and dissatisfaction, and an economic system.
Macro policy can warp startup priorities on average but it can't stop them without stopping the whole economy.