Having massive customer traction and 'blow up growth' is a valid form of customer interest, what matters is the post-blow up economices.
Uber, WeWork etc. will all make money for investors in the long run.
The concern is that there is zero real R&D or product development spending.
What R&D do you need? CRUD is solved, hosting is solved, UX is solved, scaling is solved, marketing is solved ...
Everything to do with web and mobile is very solved at this point. Most problems come from tripping over ourselves and cobbling things together to fit new domains.
All real hard R&D happens inside faang these days. At least for web/mobile consumer stuff.
If you don't need R&D, doesn't that mean your competitor also doesn't need R&D? Where's the moat?
No moat anymore in terms of “We can build a webapp faster than you can”
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates 1981 (or supposedly.
So there is a long way to go in all of these areas, and there is even a longer way to go in adjacent areas, and we're not even touching all the other things startups can do - you know - the other 95% of the economy?
Healthcare, biotech, materials, energy, construction, auto, food services. You know 'everything that's not your iPhone'.
If VC were structured differently I think we'd have a solution to hair loss and possibly sagging skin by now. Those two markets are worth 2x Google and Apple put together. People will pay for their 'youth' before they give 2 cents for a mobile phone. As the tip of the iceberg.
Skin is also a largely solved problem: use moisturizer/sunscreen/Vitamin C/Retin A, avoid the sun as much as possible, wear sunglasses, drink lots of water, eat healthy + high antioxidants, sleep well, get minor amounts of Botox occasionally for some parts of the face, microneedling occasionally, maybe a face lift (these days a more or less perfected procedure with low risk) somewhere in your 40s/50s. That plan will basically take you into your 60s looking really good. Even if you can't stick to that plan, the various restorative dermatological options will still give you a fantastic result. But most people are some combination of too apathetic, too lazy, too financially-constrained, or too afraid of more invasive techniques.
They have been saying this for 50 years. Even the technology we use today is sketchy.
"Skin is also a largely solved problem: "
This is ridiculously false.
>70% of women do many or most of those things, and they still mostly look their age. Those things help, but very mildly. There are no 55 year old women who look 30 without airbrushing + tons of makeup + facelifts.
And 80 year old women mostly look 80.
The amount of money and effort, especially women spend on this is breathtaking, considering that most of it doesn't work better than the cheaper products.
If there was something that would make 50 year olds actually look 30 it would be would have 'infinity' market value.
If you want a good example of what's now possible with anti-aging, look at Tom Ford. He's 58 and could easily pass for a 30 year old. The techniques he's using to look that way will be further refined and become more widely accessible (economically) over the next 10-20 years.
You really have no idea what you're talking about and you're clearly not someone who's actually read any related research or studied these subjects in any kind of depth. The irony is that you first pointed out the tremendous economic incentive to solve hair and skin degradation and then engaged in incoherent contortions in order to argue that these problems have somehow magically remained unperturbed by profit-maximizing agents. A mind-boggling cognitive dissonance.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/hair-for-...
Ergo what GP said
> The concern is that there is zero real R&D or product development spending.
PS if your R&D is in AI that does not fall under my original comment on “web/mobile stuff”
If you’re introducing tech that we on HN consider bog standard to a field that thinks fax machines are fancy ... are you building tech? Your users certainly think you are.