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Comment by amarkov | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that anyone on the business side considers it uncool to build a small but profitable company. It's definitely cooler than having a VC shove you along the path to an acquisition by BigCorp Ltd.

Engineers sometimes consider those companies uncool, but that's just because they usually can't pay market rate for the best engineers.

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I just mean it seems to be the path-more-taken. I'm basing it on my limited experience and my reading about running a business (which a did a bunch of but certainly never did an in depth study). A lot of companies I look at while looking for employment either want to sell or trying to grow to a mammoth size. Don't get me wrong--there is nothing wrong with that! It's just that I personally prefer to take the paycut and work for companies whose owners are slowly building a lifestyle and tightly knit team and wish I would see more of that pop up in job listings.

Its definitely not. VC funded startups are 0.1% of the global businesses out there. For every VC company there are 100k small businesses working on being productive and profitable.

I'm talking profit focused vs growth focused. Guess that wasn't very clear. Obviously making a profit is somewhere on 100% of every company's agenda.

So much this (not the case with Basecamp who pay SF rates apparently), if one doesn't want to run the business side of things - propping up business, chasing up invoices, early HR etc, then such a small business will usually not be able to pay him as much as Facebook or Google... So it's it's good enough for the founders but not good enough for other talented engineers who'd otherwise join.

...and yes, maybe saying "uncool" is a little hyperbolic... I sorta got that impression while reading about starting a business, but that was a while ago and I can't cite my sources.

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