https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13873035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827185
Is this the startup equivalent of having a funeral where no one shows up?
Really, seriously, though the startup drum has been beat very hard indeed - not merely by the magnifier anything which reaches mainstream press from anywhere thought to be technology. But I forget when I last read about a startup that either was developing technology, or was a startup in the sense I originally understood. I think I lost the appreciation I did have, when to pivot became a seemingly overnight, instantaneous, blanket verb to admit no wrong and plow on burning cash regardless of a total failure to relate real world to prospectus.
What I have enjoyed seeing from afar, is much more valuable, however, than the spectacular sums sunk in startup mirage wells: the idea that it is a good thing to swing for the fence, in particular when young and resilient to life's knocks (albeit tempered massively by the new new new medieval economy of absent social and financial safety) and the widespread promulgation of baseline knowledge how to handle just starting a company, and demystifying the corporate world, I believe will pay dividends in eventually spurring - allow me a sincere hope - a renaissance of small business. Because there sure is not much, sometimes I look, thriving in the penumbra of ZIRP funded corporate giganticism. I was just reading Berkshire Hathaway's 1990 report, yesterday. BRK was still counting in millions and tens of millions, and hundred of millions in equity... This epochal inflation has happened while so many grew up, it may be that economic historians, at least of the contrarian kind, ponder whether the startup boom was not a fear induced, hysterical, reaction to the absolute necessity to hit ball after ball out the park, in the early 21st century, to dare dream of a home and family.
edit, somehow auto correct dumped "romanticism" in the least fitting place...