Startup Koolaid - It's a beverage, it's a lifestyle | Hacker News Reader

Startup Koolaid - It's a beverage, it's a lifestyle

startupkoolaid.com

95 pointsshiftb28 comments

Jokes are just witty truths.

The startup scene is increasingly becoming a joke. I mean no disrespect to anyone who works in the scene - not to employees, not to founders, and not even to many investors. I used to be part of it myself. But what the hell is going on? People are trying to find out how many ways they can push around bits of information. They get an investment, iterate like crazy, and strive to get acquired, only to have their product completely destroyed by their new parent company.

Out of all the startups EVER created, I have only used a few products with more than passing interest: Facebook, Google, Youtube, Stack Overflow, and Yelp. And I consider myself to be pretty geeky. Having at least a crude understanding of economic concepts like supply and demand, the startup economy boggles my mind. How is it that so much money is getting circulated around hundreds of thousands of startups when only a handful of them survive for more than 3 years? (And yes, I often count acquisitions as "certain death.") Consumer goods have immediate and often necessary value. Houses last a long time, and carry obvious value. But tech companies can fizzle into nothingness in seconds. These days, value is measured in the size of your user base, which is kind of like monetizing a cat based on how many people pet it. Startups are getting so cheap to produce, I feel like we might as well be trading ideas.

All I can say is thank god for the sham. It is keeping me employed. :)

END INCOHERENT MIDNIGHT RANT

It's important to keep in mind that the total amount of money going into early stage startups is still a rounding error on larger economic investment. Numbers that feel personally large, like "$40 million" are actually very small in economic terms.

Yep that is true :) But even micro-economies should function (more or less) similarly to their macro counterparts.

Most monetary amounts are small when compared to the economy as a whole. Got any more insights for us? "The sky is only blue when you compare to grass" perhaps?

If you are going to reduce everything down to meaningless trivialities, you should also realise that Facebook, Google, Youtube, Stack Overflow, and Yelp are also just new ways of pushing around bits of information

Yes, they are about pushing around bits of information just like any other information-based tech, only they have somehow deemed themselves more useful or convenient because they are the only things I still use regularly. My point is more on the end of "how many more companies do we really need to attempt to push around bits of information?" I feel like you could almost come up with a startup generator (in fact, I am sure there are several) just by randomizing permutations of different buzz words. :) But even that was not my main point - I am more curious about how an economy based on no physical value and crazy hype-inflation is able to sustain itself.

I think you mean out of all the web based startups ever created.

Also it's okay that you're a geek and you don't use other products. Most web based startups don't try to sell to people who consider themselves the biggest geeks.

I have been alienated from the startup scene because I find that the current tech-startup scene is not about technology. Sure, when a startup gets big, it has to deal with scale: this is a territory where some deep engineering is needed. But other than that it is not the kind of research and development I admire. A lot of influental people in the startup scene has not a clue what creative engineering is about. (Think about Tim Ferris as an extremity.) I know what social is. I know what a lean startup is, I have internalized some of the wisdom of Steve Blank and others.

But I don't care about them now. I don't care about customer aquisition. I don't care about reelase early-release often. I am an engineer, and I am better at it than any of the self-help gurus out there. As an engineer I have my own internal thought processes which I have refined for years. I research and develop ambitious and deep technology. I think about the technology under the shower and on the train. Graphs, hierarchies, O(logn)-s, objects, classes and functions, (even conceptual) refactorings, sometimes even axioms and theorems are dancing in my mind all day. I have lots of TODO-s. I have new ideas every day. I know what to improve, I just need time, and I will improve those things. My motto is: TODO: 'optimize this further', 'TODO: figure this out', 'TODO: think about this from a new perspective', 'TODO: consider refactoring this in xyz way'. (I create a new GUI system in Javascript completely drawn on HMTL5 canvas. Kind of reinventing RIAs.) Engineering is important and brutally overlooked nowadays. Suprisingly few startups do ambitious deeply technical things.

Startups are more about business than technical innovation. If you're more interested in hard engineering problems, it's probably best to seek those out wherever they may be, at a startup or not.

I think there was an era when tech-startups were more tech focused from the beginning. Think about the beginning of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Borland, etc... (Even Google, but not Facebook.) On the other hand I don't want to complain. Ilove working on my side project. And I will try to create a business of it at a point. I just don't concentrate too much on that aspect at this point. I don't want it to distract me from R&D right now.

Of course there have always been some startups which seem to be more tech-focused. But, is there any evidence the percentage or absolute number of those has fallen?

Surely, you've heard of Octopart, 10gen, Blekko, DDG, Heroku, Hipmunk, DirectedEdge, RethinkDB. These are just some off the top of my head. If you don't think they're solving hard problems (not in the sense of sharing lolcats at webscale), then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

" then we'll just have to agree to disagree."

Oh, no, some of those are the companies that I am the most excited about in the current tech scene. I am not the kind of guy anyway who want to prove a point on this (despite the above 'rant'). I am just happy do discuss this. (I am an INTP and not INTJ). I don't have data on this, I just have a feeling that there were way fewer so called tech-startups 30 years ago, and according to some metrics (revenue, publicity) the ratio of highly-tech-oriented-from-the-start startups were higher. A thorough research on this would be interesting.

Microsoft's success was not about tech, though they had (and continue to have) plenty of good coders; it was about deal-making. You could also argue that marketing savvy and great timing had as much to do with Apple's earliest successes as the products themselves.

> tech companies can fizzle into nothingness in seconds

their products and services can. but the people who made them and their ideas usually don't disappear without a trace. so if you see a service that was quickly shutdown by parent company after acquisition, you have to realize it wasn't about product but team or intellectual property (or just keeping them off competitors' hands)

I agree with that thought completely - but sometimes even with people and IP in mind valuations get a little crazy (such as Google trying to acquire Path for $100 million, which they admitted was mostly based on acquiring the team).

More and more startups over time are focusing on niches, sure you may not use them and not know anyone that use them but there a lot of people out there and they are selling to a small subset.

Pretty funny. Does sort of show how laughable the startup scene is. Especially the tech startup scene. It's interesting to stand back and see how "startups" is an industry in and of itself. Almost like some kind of meta-industry. Keep selling us dreams and gold pans! :)

The thing that always niggles me about the 'drinking the company/start-up Koolaid' is it's reference to the Jonestown massacre. It was actually Flavor-Aid that was used to mask the Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan, and kill 907 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor_Aid

</pedant>

I thought it was a reference to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (for some reason, it was deemed a good idea to have 9th grade students read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

I'd always though it was that too - I'd presumed was a roughly positive expression, eg once you've drunk the company Kool-Aid, you get to see the bigger picture and understand more.

A visiting American put me right, before I'd had chance to use it incorrectly!

(Amazing book btw, love it)

This is loving and potent satire. Well played, folks!

it's missing some important items like Paul Graham's 101 Start-up Commandments and something YC-themed I couldn't come up with yet.

Submit your product. If accepted, we'll take 6% in exchange for you working on it for the next 3 months. 100k investment not guaranteed.

When she said 6%, she sort of meant 100%

genius!

Site is down for me.

up for me

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