Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

85 pointsroberja90114 comments

We have had nearly 6 months of economic gloom. Theres has been lots of hypothetical talk of who will win in these turbulent economic times.

Does anyone know of actual companies who have had some explosive growth in recent months?

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I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high.

Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluation, and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway. The recent interest rate hikes also didn't seem to have nearly as much impact on the markets as everyone feared they would.

What exactly is everyone so scared about that we all seem to think the economy is headed for a major recession?

Knowing people that make under 60k a year, and how harder their lives got and how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position. Not to mention how alot of western nations have a large majority of people are pay check to pay check regardless of their tax bracket.

Working class is a good litmus of how the economy is doing vs S&P because speculation can ultimately make it look like everything is fine until it isn't

It's always been hard for people in those income buckets. But if the question is: are we in a massive economic downturn over the past half year, it's really hard for me to look at the data and answer with a yes.

One thing I'm looking at is:

https://realtimeinequality.org/

And that's showing that for the first time in over a decade, the bottom half is seeing real wage/wealth gains, even after recent inflation. Am I missing something? Because your sentiment is the more common one.

Charts can lie. Whether or not you can buy bacon* or gas is real.

*substitute with whatever staple you wish. I used bacon here since it's historically a working class' person's meat.

Bacons a funny commodity, I don’t track the futures of it but always look at the grocery store. Pre pandemic bacon was around 2-3/lb for the cheap stuff, 4/lb for quality, and 6/lb for the niche products. I’ve seen these prices double since January this year and some products are up more than 400%. If this isn’ta sure sign of a serious problem I don’t know what would be.

Purely anecdotal but I remember buying 16pz packs of bacon for 1-2 dollars (in a large California city) for awhile, then this phenomenon called "Epic Meal Time" came about and Denny's was making bacon milkshakes and the Internet zeitgeist collectively went "lmao BACON!!" and soon after I was paying 4 dollars per pound. Supply and demand, maybe, sure. In my opinion, it was just demand and marketing.

NOW it's supply and demand, though.

https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/APU000070411...

Government price data for bacon goes back to 1980.

PS - there are other price series about bacon, including regional prices:

https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?removeAll=1&q=Bacon

Great contribution! Thank you!

That website is arcane but the data is fantastic.

Wages were rising at a similar rate before the covid hit. Remove that dip and continue the line and it would end up in about the same place it is now.

Wealth started growing since about 2019 too.

Yeah you are missing the fact that the bottom 50% of Americans don’t show up in economic charts or data. The wage disparity is so high that they basically become noise on most statistics. Basically if the top 10% do well then it looks like the entire country is doing great.

Having debt is not the worst thing in an inflationary period. The inflation reduces the value of your debt.

ONLY if your wages keep up with inflation.

Exactly. Unless of course your income is so high that day to day expenditures are basically a rounding error. Then you can profit handsomely from other people's misery. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer is particularly true during times of high inflation (so long as not catastrophic).

Yes, that's true. But that's like saying "ONLY if you don't lose your job" or "ONLY if you don't get hit by a train."

Right. And the compensation changes associated with going to a different company are almost always better than letting your current company re-evaluate your pay. So if inflation causes people to jump ship to get market-adjusted pay, you now have formerly-productive people now in FNG-mode, which is a much more impactful phenomenon than inflation on its own.

This is true for investment debt like real estate. If you're taking on debt to pay for basic necessities because salary rises don't match inflation it's an altogether different situation.

Yes, if you take on the debt after the inflation it does you no good.

But if you take loans in 2015 dollars and repay them in 2022 dollars, you are better off in terms of repayment by having a lot of inflation during that period. It doesn't matter what purpose you took the loan for.

One has to maintain those debts in the interim, unless you’re suggesting banks are offering 7 year no payment loans or equally long deferrals. Being able to weather inflation in the rest of one’s life is the problem. I’d love 1000% inflation on the money I use to pay my mortgage, but 1000% inflation at the till would be devastating. For people even mildly leveraged high inflation is painful because everything but their debt gets more expensive. Low inflation helps ease large debt obligations, but even moderate inflation will see tens of thousands of people squeezed too hard causing defaults which creates more homeless people and deaths from treatable conditions. All this said, one can try to time the market by making foreseeable purchases before inflation takes root. It seems that this time has passed for most things, but those who bought houses and cars in 2019 likely saw significant free equity. Without incoming increasing at the pace of inflation people are being slowly forced into poverty by the machinations of the capital class and their stooges.

People don't take payday loans so they can let the relative value of that loan drop.

depends if its fixed rate or not

> how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position

It's been a while since I've been in that income bracket, but I don't remember ever being strong-armed into taking on unnecessary debt. What are you referring to here?

Well, the big one is college debt, obviously.

But another example that comes to mind (as someone who lives in that income bracket about half by choice and half not) are car repairs (you HAVE to pony up or you lose your job, so the question becomes 'borrow 1k or lose 100% of your income').

Oh, and any time childcare is fucked up for any reason. Kid can't go to daycare/school because they're sick for a week? Parents don't get PTO, so their only option is to eat a week's worth of wages, and since income in is close to or level with expenses out, that means making it up with debt.

The 'strong arming' comes in because society is set up to make those your only options. (versus having public transit to rely on, walkable cities, or cheap car rentals, for example).

It doesn't have to be strong-arming, but what about propaganda?

High schoolers are still being told "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!", yet a high schooler certainly can't pay the $15K+ per year to get a degree, so they take out student loans.

And then, the same people who hounded them to get a degree then hound them when they beg for student loan forgiveness, telling them they shouldn't have taken out a loan they wouldn't be able to afford to pay back.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

> "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!"

I started college in 1999. The day my freshmen year started, jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that were already 60 years old.

This argument is revisionist bunk, in other words. Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others, that some degrees lead to higher pay and that some don't. Everybody knows this. They know it today and they knew it in 1999 and they knew it in 1979 and I categorically reject this weird, revisionist insistence that nobody could possibly have known it or that 18-year-olds are hapless dopes without any agency or even the most basic understanding of how the world works.

How many teenagers really understand the practical implications of what they're signing up for?

No one is saying teenagers lack agency, but there is definitely a problem when an outsized number are making decisions that are detrimental to their long-term future

We're in kind of a weird transitionary period with respect to our societal-level view of teenagers. Very often the same exact people are arguing that student loans are illegitimate, on the grounds that teenagers are not sophisticated enough to sign contracts, but on the other hand that the voting and/or drinking ages should be lowered, because teenagers are clearly capable of handling those responsibilities.

I'm kind of happy to go either way on this, but I think we're probably going to have to pick one. If an 18-year-old can't sign a contract, then surely they shouldn't be allowed the vote.

Furthermore, gun control is back in the spotlight after Uvalde. I just attended the TX Democratic convention and at least three speakers argued to raise the age for purchasing firearms to 21. I don’t actually have a problem with that, but we’ve gotta be consistent. There’s no way it’s justifiable to remove a constitutional right from an adult without due process.

> I just attended the TX Democratic convention and at least three speakers argued to raise the age for purchasing firearms to 21.

This will do absolutely nothing to prevent school shootings, and will have such a negligible effect on gun violence in general that I feel the Democrats are creating animosity across the aisle for no gain at all.

I won't pretend to know the solution to gun violence, but this certainly ain't it.

I think picking just one would be a bad plan. Looking back, a more principled phasing in of adult privileges and responsibilities would have been helpful. The current arrangements (at least in Canada and the US) appear pretty haphazard to me.

>I started college in 1999.

>Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others

This has only been made more extreme, but you've been checked out for at least 20 years apparently.

We shouldn't be quite so smug. Most of what developers and other tech people do is not really needed. Nice, yeah. Required? Hell, no.

Look at Facebook - they're currently the 8th most valuable company on the planet, but very few people really need what they provide, and most of their customers really don't like Facebook (and IG, etc.) and the way they know the company is manipulating them. Contrast that with a companies like Exxon or Amazon, which like them or not, produce products or services people need and want to buy. Ad markets would continue without them, and I'm already seeing companies shift marketing dollars away form digital given both poor results and waiting to see what happens. (And I'm in Austin, where things are relatively booming...)

My point is simply that 80% of what we as techies do could be eliminated tomorrow, and the world would go on. The 20% remaining could (painfully) keep things going through a downturn, especially if the alternative is unemployment.

If you think your company won't cut you loose if that 80% cost reduction becomes necessary due to depression-level forces, think again - you may not be so indispensable as you think, no matter your position - I've seen a couple of top-level thought leaders/innovators cut from local companies recently, something that didn't happen even in 2008! The reason is usually, "we're pulling back from investing in innovation and new product development." I've got a bad feeling about this...

I feel like everyone is freaking out because we went from almost unprecedentedly high tech valuations in 2021 back to ~historical norms today, which feels bad. Example: For all of the years that I was working in SaaS between 2008 - Covid, I assumed that I should plan for a ~10x revenue multiple in the optimistic case.

> and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway.

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You're not ever going to see long-term, broad price drops. That would be deflation.

Your statement appears highly misleading, as if you don't understand the topic. Prices (in the U.S.) did not rise at all in July, so it's not clear what you could mean by "8.5% month-to-month" which, as stated, would be a spectacular and unprecedented rate. The month-over-month inflation in July was none. Prices rose 8.5% vs. year-ago.

You're right. I don't know what I'm talking about.

I think many of the impacts to the economy from inflation and interest rate increases take time before we see the full picture.

For example, the housing market seemed to still be hot even with increased rates, but that is because of the delay from sales to closings. Last month started showing decreases in sales in areas that were previously on fire. And anecdotally, listings in my area that would have sold in 1 day above the listed price which are currently still on market with multiple price cuts.

The other big factor that is lingering are the student loan repayments which have been deferred for now. That is a huge chunk of monthly expense if/when they are reinstated which will have an impact on discretionary spending, etc.

> We're at extremely low unemployment

Back in 2018/2019, when I got curious and looked at what signals people look at for recessions, too low unemployment was one of them.

What's the reasoning for this?

It indicates an overheated economy

Because the US Fed will cause a recession to resist wage inflation.

> What exactly is everyone so scared about that we all seem to think the economy is headed for a major recession?

The economy seems to be doing well in 2019 dollars. However you have to take account that almost 2x more money have been printed since then. And if you divide all our numbers by 2, we are already in an economic disaster.

Surely you're not saying that anyone who has the same riches today as compared to 3 years ago is, in fact, half as rich?

If you consider money should be rare right now not plentiful, I think it’s an accurate way to look at economics.

It does however take time for all the prices to go to 2x what they were. If we end up having 7 years of 10% inflation we will be there. Had this hypothetical person still just held onto their cash, they’ll be half as rich as they were in terms that matter (purchasing power). I for one would not be surprised at all if that’s what we’re in for.

I think you know the answer:

> The recent interest rate hikes also didn't seem to have nearly as much impact on the markets as everyone feared they would.

Markets aren’t rational

And, as we all know, they will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I think the markets have been far more rational with regards to rate hikes than you are giving them credit for. It's looking like the rate hikes were priced in back in early spring, and since they've actually been slower than expected the market has experienced a bit of a bounce back.

Month over month inflation was 0 last month. We're obviously not out of the woods here, but consumer demand is dropping along with oil prices which seems to be leading the fed to believe that they may only need one more sub 1% hike in early fall. That would be much better than the doom scenarios everyone was talking about 6 months ago.

How can you be sure? Maybe they're just acting according to a rationality that humans don't understand.

Or humans aren’t rational so neither are markets

I think it’s easy to miss some of the very real pain lower income folks are experiencing right now if you’re not in their bracket. Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.

The inflation issue is absolutely not solved. A single month from 9.1 -> 8.6 is FAR too soon for victory. I suspect the recent rally in the market comes from the assumption that the Fed will back off and that we have indeed already experienced peak inflation.

CPI of 8.6 is still unacceptable and my guess is we’re gonna see more rate hikes and QT than the markets expect. That’ll mean mortgage rates go up, companies will have more difficulty servicing debt…etc

We’re not in the clear quite yet!

The move from 9.1 to 8.6 is due to a single month of zero.

People forget that 11/12th of the data for the yearly number already happened when they see the new number each month.

It’s not impossible that inflation is just 0% from here on out and yet it will still take a while for the yearly number to come down.

I mean, I don't want to discount that many people are suffering, but real income growth for the bottom 50% of earners has gone up substantially over the last year (and, notably, have gone up more than for high-earners, percentage-wise). Rising prices are bad and all, but if wages go up more than prices, as they seem to have done, then on aggregate people should be doing better, not worse.

Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.

I'm not sure I agree with this, as inflation seems to have scared markets off of their peaks. I mean, they're not down that far, but I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation. Maybe this is true for some assets, but unless I'm missing something, markets in general do not seem to be feeding off of inflation in the way you're describing here.

It’s longer term. CPI just measures a weighted prices of a basket of goods/services. In reality, the purchasing power of the dollar moves quite a bit outside the CPI basket because people absolutely spend their capital outside that basket.

> I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation.

Look around more! We’ve witnessed the greatest bull market in history and It’s largely due to the government pouring trillions of dollars into securities. Look at returns on equity and real estate since QE started in ‘08. Poor people aren’t the ones benefiting off our insane 14 yr rally.

> What exactly is everyone so scared about that we all seem to think the economy is headed for a major recession?

All the tech layoffs and hiring freezes that are happening. Whats the explanation for it if everything is fine and dandy.

If you, like most people on hn, are in tech then you are highly insulated from the impact of a recession/downturn/whatever you want to call it.

You likely make significantly more than the nation average household and your job security and prospects are likely significantly higher.

I think the doom and gloom is a bit overblown too but who knows if tomorrow my company says xyz isnt looking good. Time for layoffs.

The real "reason" for this "recession" is all those stupid articles about the "great resignation". I knew as soon as those appeared the billionaire ruling class would rather cut off their own arms than allow the notion of workers getting access to some of the wealth they create. Thus: "Panic! Recession! Work harder!"

Do you have any substantiation for that?

You mean other than the 200 years of history since the start of the industrial revolution?

Well, for starters there's the proven collusion between big tech CEOs in the very recent past to keep wages suppressed... I "suppose" it could be coincidence that the FAANG execs all came out at the same time and made a big Kabuki dance about "everyone work harder or we'll fire you"... But my money is on the square that they are colluding with each other again... Because they already proved they will do that.

I think the gloom sentiment is also no good. Life is bountiful and joyful.

But I wouldn't build my case on the provided numbers. Inflation numbers, unemployment numbers are not yesterday's numbers, as in they are not derived the same way. They mean exactly what they intended to mean, for managing expectations in the present.

>Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluation, and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway.

Man, this attitude is terrible. My life and all of my colleagues lives have been completely flipped upside down by this inflation. This comment just donwplaying it as a non-issue made me really angry. How out of touch are you? I can barely afford groceries anymore. And not the organic kind - the bottom basement price chopped discount kind.

The typical US poster on HN likely makes 3x or 4x the US national median income.

I'm sorry, I meant no disrespect. I agree inflation is a very real issue, my comment only meant to question whether it's going to continue to be a long-term issue and whether it's an indicator of a broader economic downturn or not.

Because what are we working on?

Amazon is running out of people willing to work in its warehouses; gig work gets old fast.

Low unemployment is unsustainable if it’s unfulfilling errand running.

There’s little net new invention going on in entrenched big tech; Bezos and co are riding high on mathematical inference by accountants; it’s a math scam being forced upon people who can’t “see” how he’s not really invented anything new; distributed computing under unified api; wow.

Capturing eyeballs is easy when the masses are oblivious; the biological quirk religion stumbled upon is being intentionally manipulated.

Except for nation state prestige, there’s little net new coming out of all these tech companies; writing apps and todo lists? Come on. Video games? 40+ years old. Better chat bots? Meh.

Story mode still rules; we’re iterating on the childhood nostalgia of 70-80s kids who also happen to be the early tech boom crowd; shock. Where is the net new? We’re getting faster with higher resolution.

Propping up the dollar in lock step with history. Which is why I believe all the pipe dreams about singularity and rockets to nowhere will never happen; kids growing up with these things will see sooner than the elders who were mesmerized by this stuff that it’s all “nuclear powered rocket cars” again.

Generational churn is what’s creating the rocky situation politically. Society will stabilize on a “new normal” as more of the 50+ crowd dies off. And the normal the 20-30s crowd wants is progressive; they’ve not lost their desire for political change as they age into their 30s like prior generations did as inequality still controls their life; prior generations lost their progressiveness as they bought houses and had families; something even 30 year olds cannot do; the elders have monopolized having a good life. The young want to be represented by like minded people and are just waiting out the resistance.

80% of last gens Fortune 500 are gone. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and open up economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

Same will happen as the elders with monopoly on politics die. Chip companies aren’t going anywhere, but HN is a filter bubble; there’s little dedication to these stupid software companies among the young; see FB use tanking among teens. No one I know under 40 cares about Metas verse, but it was on Today the other day! They’re gaming the clueless. The veil is pierced and frankly software as an industry deserves it; most is copy-paste work while everyone else grows their potatoes.

> Video games? 40+ years old.

As a gamer, I find this is incredibly dismissive.

There's still tons of new ideas in games being explored. Factorio introduced the factory building genre in 2014, and we're still seeing new takes on it. Satisfactory made it first-person and beautiful. Dyson Sphere Program made it multi-planet and interstellar. Captain of Industry made destructible and moveable terrain.

The colony sim genre as we know it today did not exist 10 years ago. Now we have RimWorld, Banished, Oxygen Not Included, and more.

Even puzzle games continue to innovate. Baba is You is probably the most unique puzzle game I've ever seen, and then there's all the Zachtronics games...

So yeah...the product of "video games" might be 40+ years old, but it's silly to claim that there's nothing net new coming out.

I think OP was referring to major new verticals... Video game vertical is 40+ years old now. Sure still lots of innovation happening within the vertical, but anything that is going to change the trajectory of humanity?

Virtual Reality is an increasingly popular vertical that's emerged in the mainstream in the last decade. Mobile gaming too.

I think it's silly to expect every innovation to "change the trajectory of humanity".

Sometimes people just want entertainment and that's fine. Based on the OP's response to my comment, I wonder if they consider leisure time to be wasted time.

Humans went millions of years entertaining themselves without computers.

Why keep chucking real resources down the drain for Zachtronics? If you want logic puzzles there are simple paper books full of them.

This is peak entitlement; the future must cope with your leisure preferences. Not voting rights, or clean water; you are owed video games.

You would defend until the end your right to not sacrifice any scrap of figurative identity. How incredibly dismissive of future peoples entire existence.

Launch the nukes, Putin. If we’re just going to iterate like mindless dweebs into collapse of the species why not go out in a blaze of glory; that would truly be metal af

> Humans went millions of years entertaining themselves without computers.

More like a couple hundred thousand years, not millions, but that's a moot point.

Humans went thousands of years without a lot of things. This is not a convincing argument.

> Why keep chucking real resources down the drain for Zachtronics? If you want logic puzzles there are simple paper books full of them.

False equivalency.

I could easily turn this around and ask why chuck resources on publishing puzzles on paper when I can do them digitally.

> This is peak entitlement; the future must cope with your leisure preferences.

Really? Enjoying spending my time on video games is "peak entitlement"?

> Not voting rights, or clean water; you are owed video games.

Textbook whataboutism.

> You would defend until the end your right to not sacrifice any scrap of figurative identity. How incredibly dismissive of future peoples entire existence.

Yes...I'm sure me playing a few rounds of Legion TD 2 or a couple hours of Final Fantasy is going to threaten the existence of the future.

> Launch the nukes, Putin. If we’re just going to iterate like mindless dweebs into collapse of the species why not go out in a blaze of glory; that would truly be metal af

You are either mentally ill, an extreme workaholic, or a troll. Please seek help.

Don’t diagnose me over an air gapped network.

What’s that? I’m not chanting the traditions the way you would? So I’m mentally ill? That’s some traditional values BS.

Peak entitlement; anyone who isn’t enabling your figurative identity is some sort of broken thing. Childish reasoning.

Paper and pencil don’t require nearly the same level of toxic waste and slave labor; so false equivalence.

You can’t say false equivalence and have it be true you have to actually quantify why their damage is the same; again childish logic.

Peak entitlement is that you aren’t giving a damn what video games cost everyone in real terms, you’re hung up on living in your bubble and expect billions of others to coddle your feelings like mommy and daddy did. But if you’re putting it out there you have no obligation to consider others sensibilities before your own; fuck yours too. Who cares about one of seven billion whose parameters are pretty similar to billions of others, since you like logic and stats so much.

Less than 13% of the public have greater than a bachelors. While polls show most Americans think it’s 35-40%. The world is not composed of as many like minds as you think. You’re outnumbered.

“Work” is a term defined in physical sciences; my biology “works” 24/7. I loath “job culture”. Hanging in a hammock by a river last week my imagination conjured up numerous story threads for a space opera. Video games are someone else’s imagination.

I have built engines for my own games and worked with the big engines; I’ve modded games going back to Doom.

I’ve built game loops and models; I know how games work.

The suggestions you cherry picked still do not come with any fundamentally new technology behind them as it’s still a machine of known constraints.

Rockets to nowhere is nostalgia for the Spaceship. Cherry picked games are nostalgia for playing Super Mario. It’s all a huge waste of real resources, the real deficit we’re leaving the future, since the fiat money one is a shared hallucination detached from that material reality.

Games are entertainment.

Part of the frustration I have with the game industry is taking themselves entirely too seriously.

It's like watching Dr Seuss search for some deeper meaning outside of simply entertaining and teaching children.

Why can't being entertaining be enough?

Inflation is still a huge issue. The last numbers we got indicated 8% inflation. The fed target is 2%. That means that not only are people seeing huge decreases in buying power, but the fed is going to have to continue putting the hurt on the economy in order to get things back under control.

Inflation is still at 8.5% it is still an issue. Rates on 30 year conventional mortgages are extremely high compared to just a year ago.

Food and energy costs which are not considered in mainline inflation figures are still very high.

Regular people are concerned about affording basic necessities. Supply chains are absolutely fucked. The company I work for is so effected that the folks in logistics are talking to ship captains and port managers, and we’re pretty well insulated from most of the inflation. My colleagues and I are hurt more by inflation than my company is. This inflation is wild though. Large companies are posting obscene profits while fighting labor on every front, raising prices massively (just got back the store and some items are up 300% from last month), and have taken full advantage of government subsidies. Consumers are well and truly tapped out, look at target posting a massive decline. Target’s performance is a bellwether of middle class conditions and its bleak. Walmart is also reporting a decline. Companies should have been preparing for this 6-12-36 months ago, the signs were there. Instead short-term-ism won out again in board rooms and talking heads look like a surprised pikachu trying to talk around the problems effecting consumers and the obvious solutions. People need affordable: food, housing, transportation, and healthcare. The rampant and excessive profiteering in these industries has dug a huge hole that is going to be exceptionally painful to dig out of because so many people have had their lives wasted on truly frivolous endeavors. I expect the beatings to continue until morale approves or the proletariat finds their voice. All these people you hear fear mongering are the soundtrack to the game of musical chairs playing in the economy.

I've been on the interview loop with robotics companies. Out of 20, only two had hiring on hold. Many were either already in a cash strong position or had cash strong backers who are long on robotics.

I personally am long on robotics. The longer time horizon to market does mean ROI takes a hit in a high interest rate world. But I think the statement "the future will have more robots" is less controversial than some of the future scenarios that other companies are predicated upon.

I don’t know if you can count them as a startup still, but Vercel seems to be doing all the right things during this downturn.

Connecting up GitHub and watching it runs tests, build, and deploy without much configuration was very gratifying for me. I haven’t felt that feeling towards a tech product in years. It was so simple and easy, the same feeling I felt the first time I used Uber. The same feeling as our first Stripe transaction, or when we launched a stack on AWS.

Is this similar to Netlify? This has changed everything for me when it comes to deploying mini test sites or tools. No more nginx wrangling just to get a script available online.

I believe Netlify is similar.. Next/Nuxt was created by Vercel though as far as I understand.

Less doing well because of the downturn, more doing well despite of it, but many players in climate tech are doing really really well lately (for example [1]). Longer term, with IRA [2] now law, the industry is poised to continue to grow faster and faster.

[1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/climatetech-finance/inv... [2] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/this-is-hu...

In the crypto ecosystem the compliance and anti-fraud space is doing very well (it's about time):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/doppel-helps-nft-projects-...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/20/ai-based-startu...

https://www.theblock.co/post/159791/center-raises-11-million

Shameless plug - Doppel and Optic are direct competitors for what I've been building:

https://fnftf.io/

(We're the only solution that's publicly available).

Not to mention the various Know Your Customer, mixer detectors, etc such as Chainalysis, TRM Labs, etc.

I know crypto isn't popular on HN - given the amount of fraud, etc I've certainly jumped in here and elsewhere with plenty of comments and my thoughts elaborating on just how bad things are in the space (I do live and breathe it every day). My take is regardless of where you stand on crypto we should all be able to get behind solutions that are trying to clean up the space. Fact is it is here and (little) people are getting ripped off and scammed left and right.

On a side note (and probably worthy of an Ask HN) I've been self funding Tovera for a year and we have yet to land any investment after six months of trying and hundreds of hours (minimum) spent on the effort. Plenty to be said about the good and bad of where we are and how my motivation and mental health is doing. Our three direct competitors are all technically inferior and well behind us yet combined they've raised $27m... Classic story of the value of vision, pitch, and salesmanship vs tech.

I don’t know about much about the space but my first impression is the initial pitch is confusing.

Fight NFT Fraud sounds like a service for company buying/selling NFTs, and needs to stop attacks on their system and is actually slightly vague.

Seems like people can check if a specific NFT is stolen or improperly minted?

Lead with that. CarFax for NFT (but even more important)

Is that NFT Stolen? Check now.

Then after the submission box can go into more detail.

Thank you for the feedback!

Yes, I'm glad the core sentiment and functionality comes across.

One of the biggest issues in the space (for Tovera and FNFTF) is that the crypto ecosystem is so sleazy no one in our targeted user/customer base (slightly sophisticated users and beyond) trusts anything or anyone - and rightfully so.

In reaching out on Twitter, etc getting anyone to engage with something like FNFTF to even upload a PNG/JPG is near impossible. Install a browser extension?!?! Yeah right. Our most common response is "Nice try, scammer".

This is why we have "Show me a Random Ape" and "What have other people searched" buttons. It's practically all anyone who visits the site uses because of the issues I mentioned. So that's why we try to lead with something above the fold.

It's a chicken/egg reputational issue for us. Granted all of this is the creator and collector space - the real customer is an NFT platform, marketplace, etc that would integrate us in the backend somewhere so a user that already trusts wherever they are would inherently trust us.

Ok I got way to into this. Here are some verbiage changes: https://imgur.com/a/oXGcgcW

Now this is coming from, as I said, a person not in the space. Your users more sophisticated but still think language could be sharper.

If could already show last few NFTs searched for might be the best (yes always easy for person to suggest things they don't have to implement, ha)

Wow, thank you! Don't be surprised if you see some of these suggestions deployed in the near future.

YES - we're already building front-end support for more "wow" factor on various NFT statistics, recent searches, realtime newly minted NFTs, etc. I'm the furthest thing from a UI/UX person but I have faith in the team that we'll be able to certainly come up with something more engaging than what we have today (which isn't saying much)!

Thanks again!

Sort of. We do a lot on the graph AI + graph viz as powertools behind investigative teams here, and behind the scenes, it's not such a clean story. Some real growers, but most we've seen hit a surprisingly low ceiling:

- There just isn't that much KYC-worthy commercial+retail transaction volume, and a lot that does exist is from just a handful of big exchanges etc. So there is some revenue here, but not enough for standalone co's at current ecosystem's level. The "real" KYC play is still largely investors speculating on a future years from now and propping these co's up.

- There was a lot of crypto startups needing their smart contracts vetted. Still some $ overhand from last 2-3 years where these are still happening. A bunch of crypto companies cratered, and we'll probably keep seeing that, so uncomfortable inbetween period for these auditors too.

- Two big areas growing are (a) gov are getting more into chasing this stuff down and (b) banks are warming up to crypto offerings. The former is real revenue for teams who know how to work with tricky gov entities, and the latter is POC $. I'm seeing some compliance stuff happening (similar to how Stripe does taxes for you know, imagine someone doing KYC for you accepting ETH), but again, tiny market that's really a speculation for who-knows-when.

It's pretty "easy" to hustle $Xm in services contracts, but big recurring revenue is not so clear cut due to the market.

Traditionally companies involved with gambling do VERY well during recessions. It's not really an industry I want to be in but a lot of folks I knew who worked on or build slot machines/slot machine tech got huge bonuses during the last 08-10 years.

Plenty of smaller companies in that space if you look for them.

Fanduel is hiring like crazy right now.

The availability of cheap and easy debt is the main thing that has changed in this economy. Startups that don't rely on debt for financing are still doing fine.

With the drop in VC checks being written and overall interest rates, I'd expect revenue-based financing to have a good year.

Pipe, Arc.tech, etc.

Or better: which companies do you think will survive and continue to go strong as they exit the downturn (however long it is). I’m still long Meta, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, etc.

FTX exchange seems to be going great and doing fine. Tons of revenue, very low head count and lots of cash at their disposal. So much, that they are offering to take over other failing startups affected by the downturn.

That is a sign of a company that will survive in the long term since they are thriving even in these conditions.

They have a lot of cash, but SBF theoretically could close shop and cash out if he feels the amount of money he will be able to donate will be down for the longterm. The entire point of FTX, ultimately, is to take money from crypto traders and put it into Effective Altruism charities.

> The entire point of FTX, ultimately, is to take money from crypto traders and put it into Effective Altruism charities.

The entire point of FTX is to profit from the unregulated crypto markets by front-running his clients with the FTX-Alameda combo and pump (to bring in new cows to milk) and dumping (to crash the markets and buy sinking companies on fire sale) the markets; while waving the altruism flag.

I am partially involved with the EA community and know he does indeed donate, I don't believe it's just a case of waving an altruism flag but completely genuine efforts.

I mean both can be true. SBF has perhaps been too gung ho with his EA donations, burning enormous piles of cash down some very deep rabbit holes. And he got that money by using his market maker to front run his own exchange.

We and our peers have been busy:

- Gov, especially cyber + analytics (we do graph ai + gpu viz stuff)

- Supply chain: A slowdown is happening, but COVID, regional conflicts, etc. makes needs for manufacturing etc. companies here super burning

- Cyber + fraud: The need hasn't gone away (more automated attacks every day!), though companies based around VC blitz and pushing their gaping tech + operational holes to acquirers are hurting as fewer people happy to give them free $

- Devops was hard and remains hard. Digital transformation is an ongoing process and still needs a lot of help.

SMB SaaS seems to be doing just fine.

Yes the SMB space, and the MSP vendor space (aka "The Channel"), that sell through to SMBs, seem to have not missed a beat.

In this context, do you mean SaaS for small and medium businesses? Or do you mean small and medium (sized) SaaS companies? Or is SMB in this context some other acronym I’m not thinking of?

> SaaS for small and medium businesses

This one

I work in the healthcare technology/interoperability space. A ton of startups here don’t seem to be affected. The one I work for is certainly thriving.

I work in a healthcare startup too and can confirm that the interest in investing in innovative tech in this industry is only going up.

Can confirm, healthcare SaaS doing well.

commercetools is seeing incredible growth, and it's only going to become more prominent in the ecommerce space.

Having worked in ecommerce for a while now, I noticed back in 2008 that ecommerce flourishes when the economy goes sour. It's not strictly recession-proof- during the economic disruption, you will see separation of the wheat and the chaff, but new ecommerce technology that works gets supercharged.

A decade and a half ago saw the emergence of Magento, BigCommerce, and while Demandware (based on Intershop) had been around for a bit, they emerged from the recession with afterburners on full blast. Shopify would hit stride later, eating into Magento and Demandware's lunch around the time they each got bought up for billions of dollars by Adobe and Salesforce, respectively.

There were plenty of companies in the space that fell apart during the great recession too, but their talent moved on to the dominating players. You're seeing that happen during the last couple of years too. There have been some infamously rapid collapses - the implosion of Fast, Shopify's stock prices making a rapid return to normalcy. I strongly suspect you'll see other VC-backed 'disruptors' in the space fall apart. A newer 'headless' platform that talks a big talk recently put out a press release trumpeting a new deal that comically only listed former customers in the name-drop brag section of a press release, not a great look when you're the new kid on the block.

Commercetools is where enterprise companies go to get away from legacy ecommerce platforms like Oracle (RIP), Salesforce, SAP Hybris, and homegrown systems - but in the last year it has also increasingly brought on graduates from the Shopify Plus and BigCommerce ecosystems.

Anyone who’s offering good product at a cheaper price point than the tech companies that got bloated over the last 5 or so years (Twilio comes to mind)

Shameless plug:

The startup I work for, Vivun, 4X'd our ARR over the course of our latest fiscal year and received a $75M Series C funding in May.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/vivun-is-digitizing-pre-sa...

proptech is continuing to thrive. people need a roof over their heads whether it's to rent or own so startups solving problems surrounding renting/buying/managing/living in a home, apartment, condo, association, trailer, mobile park, co-op, furnished, short term, etc... will continue to thrive.

btw, if anyone reading on HN is interested in joining a startup tackling the property management angle, hmu! my company helps manage 200k+ rental units across america and always interested in capable and enthusiastic folks to join.

I'm currently interviewing at a battery startup.

Considering the current policies it seems like those companies should remain well funded for foreseeable future.

Anyone getting rich off Federal funds.

This is downvoted but there is a niche of companies that thrive under federal money from various agencies grants and contracts, and these didn't really go down much. I would disagree with the "getting rich" as they have a mandate to serve whatever mission from the agency that gave them money.

This is not a downturn.

We have been growing like crazy - https://rezi.ai/

Ah man, that's what every CEO says.

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