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Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

Messy is right. It's as if competently running a business people want to continue patronizing keeps slipping everybody's minds. No bootstrapped business thinks they can get away with this many gaffes in a row. Because on the very first screw-up, you lose some amount of money, and it's your own money, and it hurts, and you learn. In a startup funded like this, money is just the stuff you throw at stuff, and there's always more where that came from. Obviously the whole VC-funded hyper-growth thing doesn't guarantee success, has a low success rate in fact, but I'm starting to wonder whether those investments actively prevent success in some cases.

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It actively impedes success in every environment that I've seen it in, and the only difference is that some companies have such a compelling product that they're able to be successful in spite of the problems brought about by "hyper-growth".

Somewhere core to the problem is that providing good direction is hard. Hiring good people is hard. Making sure good people are working together in the right direction is hard. "Hyper-growth" basically trivializes all those things so that you're hiring as fast as you can, which keeps you from meaningfully on-boarding people, and leaves a bunch of people without good direction.

The knock-on effects of that dynamic can be disastrous. Low morale due to shapes of listlessness. Late stage integration issues due to folks working for long periods in sporadic threads that need to be woven together. Political infighting as too many people with not really enough meaningful work to do start getting creative for their own ends at the expense of others or the organization.

I have been around and in a lot of "hyper-growth" startups, and not one of them that I interacted with operated remotely close to a well-oiled functioning organization.

> Messy is right. It's as if competently running a business people want to continue patronizing keeps slipping everybody's minds. No bootstrapped business thinks they can get away with this many gaffes in a row. Because on the very first screw-up, you lose some amount of money, and it's your own money, and it hurts, and you learn. In a startup funded like this, money is just the stuff you throw at stuff, and there's always more where that came from. Obviously the whole VC-funded hyper-growth thing doesn't guarantee success, has a low success rate in fact, but I'm starting to wonder whether those investments actively prevent success in some cases.

Is this how it is, boots on the ground wise though? I've worked for VC funded startups and we never treated budgets as something to be scoffed at and were very cost conscious.

My theory is that a lot of people read Zero to One, decided that spending more money than anyone else to build a monopoly is the best strategy (even if you work in an area with low barriers to energy), managed to find a VC fund with the same attitude (Softbank), and are now finding out that no amount of money helps you if you're selling dollar bills for $.50 over a series of years.

Hey man, movie pass was on the cusp of upending the movie industry!

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