Comment by jv22222 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jv22222 | Hacker News Reader

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I am totally at odds with what PG has said here.

I said - "If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble."

I stand by that.

To expand, IMHO the current "chasing after the golden ticket of investment" model would crumble.

But we humans are a very diverse bunch. It would be impossible for a few of us NOT to notice large scale problems and go after them.

Therefore, out of the masses of self driven "no-investment" entrepreneurs - there would be a few that would create the next internet, or cisco, or cable.

Under my Utopian ideal there's no reason why anyone couldn't seize and capitalize on big ideas as they arose.

The only difference is that VC's (and dare I say organizations like YC) wouldn't be the hub of the entrepreneurial universe that they now seem to be.

Of course there would most likely be a new hub of sorts. I'm not sure what that would look like. Although a while back I did have some specualtion.

http://justinvincent.com/page/100/how-to-trump-microsoft-goo...

Also, if I'm not mistaken, isn't the "lifestyle business" model the exact route that PG took to success?

He built Webgen/Viaweb an app that solved a problem for people that were willing to pay money for it. He iterated on it, built up the revenue, and then had the good fortune of selling it to Yahoo.

(I'm not even sure if Viaweb had investment did it? Anyone know?)

Viaweb had investment. And it wasn't a lifestyle business - there was a terrifying bit in the middle where they weren't profitable. Plus the investors tried to screw them over multiple times, right up to the point where they got acquired. You really do need to read up on Viaweb's history.

My counter-argument to your post can be summed up in one question: name me one lifestyle business that is consumer Internet, of sufficient scale so as to make the world a better place.

Almost every startup in the 37signals's Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud series are in enterprise. Consumer Internet companies (which are what blogs like Techcrunch obsess over) have different rules, different scale.

Github certainly makes my world a far better place, and to my knowledge they haven't taken any VC funding.

Github is the rare exception. I'm not saying that it's impossible, I'm saying that of the set of startups that have changed the world, it's just ... Github that's a lifestyle business. Every other one has taken funding. What does that say, empirically, about the nature of both models?

Note: I'm not arguing one's better than the other, I'm just rebutting OP's belief that 'lifestyle businesses are the way to go for everyone, woohoo!'

Most mac apps have no investment, and I think they'd count. For example, http://www.panic.com/, http://www.omnigroup.com/.

if developers suddenly started acting as a cartel, all that would happen is non-developers would become developers to fill the demand in building new businesses

nobody is saying anything against lifestyle businesses or micro businesses or whatever you call it. the argument is about your claim that capital investment isn't required (although self-funding is still an investment) and that we would have the same world today without the capital markets or the media, just if developers went and got on with it

outside capital expedites growth and development. if you don't do it, the next guy will, that is how a free market works. our entire civilization has benefited from this - how would microprocessors have even been invented, designed and manufactured as a non-funded business, let alone kept up with moores law?

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