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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an entrepreneur, so by all means you know far more than me. But it does puzzle me that a lot of your ventures seem very...generic. Like you made a tech blog in 2008. Great, but why is your blog special? That's like making a Twitter account now. There are some people who receive massive success from Twitter, but they're very rare.

Then you created a note taking app. I don't know if note taking apps were that huge in 2010, but it seems like they were since Evernote was founded in 2000. Ditto with a social media platform, with a news aggregator, with a link manager. Don't get me wrong, massive kudos to you for launching and working hard on these products. It just seems to me that you've been making stuff that already exists and doesn't have any differentiation. Even if you had a new feature or two, to quote Steve Jobs, that's a feature, not a company.

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It's undoubtedly got to be hard for the "entrepreneur" without novel ideas or an ability to notice market shortcomings and imagine patches to them. Like you, I read this post with a bit of incredulity - sure, you might want to "be your own boss" and "launch a successful product" but in order to actually do that... you kinda have to do something novel. I don't want to crap on OP's dreams, but I don't see the link manager thing turning into a billion dollar unicorn.

I feel like this is the same thing that happens with musicians and artists - it's trend hopping and hoping to get a second of the spotlight for what's in vogue. One year it's brostep, then it's NFT, then its your vanlife miniseries on Youtube, then it's your hyperpop EP, then it's your "metaverse" art project, etc. I know a lot of people like this and few of them seem to find lasting success because they either aren't sticking in a certain domain long enough to really excel, or have no real passion other than chasing "success" which results in ventures that are half-baked and obvious clones of things that already exist.

> but I don't see the link manager thing turning into a billion dollar unicorn.

I suspect for every $1000M unicorn, there are 1000x $1M businesses.

1. Many of those 1000 $1M businesses can be very derivative, but with some focus that is just too specific for competition (vertical, market, # of clients, feature focus, whatever). That link manager could easily be a yummy small business.

2. I suspect one can make as much money *adjusted-for-risk* with a $1M businesss as one can trying to make a $1000M business (cap-table and yearly profits are also often ignored, and one might make little especially if one is not the founder of a unicorn).

Sure, then I guess the question is how likely any of that is and if we’re adjusting for risk, what’s the opportunity cost vs just working for someone else? My guess is that in 10+ years of saving or investing zero dollars, each subsequent year of dream chasing is going to have an opportunity cost so high that the big payout ending would be the only thing that could balance the scales

The “unicorn plan” is highly leveraged, high risk, and founders ignore the Kelly Criterion for their costs (especially their time).

I would love to see the average return for the founders of ycombinator startups. Given the power law (Pareto) distribution, it can probably be calculated by knowing the number of founders from 2005 to 2010, and some rough estimates of returns for the major ycombinator success stories.

VC as an fund category has poor returns (“the Cambridge Associates U.S. Venture Capital Index averaged just 5.06% per year between 2000 and 2020”). Also VC returns compared with founders equity: have higher seniority (preferential), lower volatility, diversity, and the chance of getting the necessary outlier success story returns.

The median/average founder in the market is a loser.

Do a funded startup for social status, to learn, to gamble, or for kicks. Don’t become a funded founder because it makes financial sense for an individual.

I was naive back then and had very little understanding of how things work. I jumped into things because I felt they were cool and not really worrying about solving a problem.

And I wish I could share some pics of my failed ones, I did try my best to differentiate.

So how is your current project different?

It feels like you're jumping on trends when they have existed for years already without bringing anything new to the table. That'll never get you anywhere.

> It feels like you're jumping on trends when they have existed for years already without bringing anything new to the table. That'll never get you anywhere.

With all due respect, who the fuck are you? And who the fuck do you think you are telling anyone they won't get anywhere? OP's current project has paying customers. That's more than most people ever get to.

Much respect to the persistence, and please ignore these naysayers. I have no doubt you know your space and customers better than they do.

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