Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for reposting this, I didn't see it the first time around. Many of the pro-startup stuff I see, in particular this Altman piece, make me subtly uncomfortable, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's because, while I live in the Valley, I'm a Seattle native. Maybe it's because Sam's younger than I am. Maybe it's because I like the suburbs better than San Francisco proper. Maybe it's because I'm not an Ideas guy; this isn't targeted at me because I have no interest in starting a company and dedicating every second of my waking life to it. That's why I was hesitant to comment at all. "Of course you're uncomfortable with it," the reply to my comment would read, "you non-disruptive loser" it would end.

For those who want a unicorn valuation, I'm sure Sam's piece is great. Or maybe it's not, I don't know.

But what I do know is he kept mentioning how competition never kills startups. It's failure to execute. Why balance burnout and cashflow and hiring and funding in some kind of race to become a unicorn if competitors won't actually kill you?

Why not grow at a reasonable pace, running a reasonable business, that makes reasonable money?

I think the advice re. competitors tends to be about "how much should you worry about what a competitor is doing _right now_" - and the answer to that is pretty much always "not a whole lot." You can have two businesses doing similar things but taking radically different approaches to execution and both succeeding in their own way.

But on the macro scale there are always windows of opening and closing opportunity on what makes for a viable business before (new technology takes over/bigger companies start paying attention/governments try to regulate you out of existence), and it is that more general climate of whether it's possible to execute at all that pressures the potential unicorns into a do-or-die mode. Monopolistic competition like e.g. Uber vs. Lyft is an exceptional case for technology; the expectation is that if you succeed at all you will probably be in complete control until the technology ecosystem itself shifts.

There is a second half to this, of course, which is that the type of people who found a fast-moving VC-backed startup are so deeply enmeshed in their plans for the company that they will put themselves into an unsustainable overdrive and expect everyone around them to do the same. Their enthusiasm can be entirely real and still be basically toxic and lacking in conservative sensibility. There are a lot of commonalities among founder personalities, IME.

Because then the growth of valuation metrics will be slow and you will not be able to justify round A,B,C,+,-, etc.

Try reading it through the eyes of an investor putting capital to work rather than the person doing the work.

Results don't scale linearly with effort. I don't know if it's worth it.

I should do a blogpost about the small business I took over from my dad, and the impact it had.

Yes, yes you should.

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