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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

I was an engineer at a successful startup.

We grew, we went bankrupt, we laid off most the company, the founders kicked in enough to keep us going and we restructured to give the remaining people larger shares. We became profitable and finally sold to another company.

My payday was about $70k, which was a nice bonus, I was happy to get it. I moved on to big tech. The company withered away, the company that bought it withered away too. I think the company that bought that company might also have disappeared. The domain keeps getting renewed, but has been broken for a couple of years, and for half a decade before that was just a WordPress site hosting a scrape of some of the content that used to be on the website.

And we were one of the lucky ones.

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That sucks. I know quite a few stories like that. I'm more active as an investor these days than as an entrepreneur, the projects I still run are more for fun than for income (or even potential income) and I can't tell you how happy I am that that pressure has abated somewhat.

It's annoying that even the successes tend to screw over the employees and more often than not the founders as well. Typical dilution by the time you reach series 'A' (assuming that that's all that you need to take off) is terrible and if you need more capital you end up working for banks and VCs.

If I were to start another company (which I am trying very hard to avoid) I would try extremely hard to do it without outside capital and I would do it in some boring b2b field where nobody else wants to go because it isn't sexy enough to be able to attract capital. That way you avoid several of the risks of starting a new company at once: you have a relatively safe niche, no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share and the people that will receive your product are going to be super happy simply because there is no alternative.

Do opportunities like these still exist?

Yes, absolutely. Looking at one right now actually (NDA, so I can't tell you about it but it's a gem).

Thanks. Reading a thread like this is sobering on the one hand, but also gives the feeling of "it's all pointless and crowded" :)

Private equity is buying up as many as they can* but that proves they still exist!

* https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-private-equity-...

The corporate world is littered with them (esp. at medium-scale), but you can't magically discover them by reading on the internet.

Feels like most of the problems in that class I’ve stumbled upon were not viable. Not because there wasn’t a need but rather because the people suffering from the problem aren’t the ones signing the cheques, and the ones signing the cheques don’t really care about making the grunts’ work easier/more efficient since that’s what they’re being paid for: to toil.

What advice could you share for discovering this kind of problems that also can also be monetized?

> That sucks.

Don't get me wrong; it was a good experience, as well as being good experience. I got paid a decent salary throughout, the work was frequently interesting, and my coworkers were great, not that I've done a good job of keeping in touch.

But it wasn't a life-changing payday, and even the investors mostly broke even. It was a success in that it became profitable with a couple mil in revenue, not in the VC sense.

Besides the whole period where we ran out of money, laid off half the company, and were months away from going under, the only real downside was that, as a small company, I was basically on call 24/7 to deal with problems with my part of the world. It didn't come up often but when it did it sucked.

That’s exactly what I started: https://gitlab.com/logotype/fixparser

It’s a quite boring project, but it is niche - and there is no alternative, at least not in the JS/TS ecosystem. Many startups/crypto/financial institutions (including YC startups) uses and are paying customers of my product.

I’ve tried finding an investor (including YC) to grow the project but no-one is interested. It doesn’t matter, I’ll keep going anyway. But if someone is interested reach me at info@fixparser.io

Hey, way to try to profit of another persons failure. Really sociopathic of you!

May I ask how you monetize this?

> no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share

I wonder how much innovation is being stifled by this practice. I know I have at least one very viable idea (I've shopped it around) that could result in substantial improvement to the overall Internet experience, and I'm doing nothing with it because the minute I make it available, a Big Tech company will either steal it, try to buy me out (and I don't like them so my answer will be no) and then copy/reverse engineer what I've done. So I've opted to spend my time/energy on something else.

Basically what's the opportunity cost of these uncompetitive practices for the industry and field of study as a whole?

I hear you, and still:

How many Einsteins perished in the fields or trenches? How much innovation and genius is stifled through lack of access to food, water or education?

I think that would be an area where improvements would be more impactful than trying to prevent copycats.

Ironically, that's what I decided to spend my time on instead. I was trying to decide whether to do a PhD with said technical project/idea or to do one focusing on non-programming technical skills + history for early education precisely because I think improving the education level of the general public is also a good way to improve things.

I did have a similar concerns. My answer to this situation is to embrace it, make the idea open source with copyleft licence from the start. This gives opportunity to galvanize a community find early adopters and contributors.

If BigTech gets into it, that will be a positive signal which will make idea known and make a market of customers for it. I have no need to be the first, but just be in the game.

Unfortunately investors are now all over B2B startups because they're now keenly aware of just how stacked the odds are against you in consumer products. Even YC nowadays calls consumer facing ideas "tar pits". It's also way easier for investors to pump up B2B valuations through cross pollination between portfolio companies

> The domain keeps getting renewed

This is a funny thing with companies that get taken over.

My dad used to run an ISP, one of the first ones in my home country. I'm talking 28.8kbit modems. The company was sold and shut down more than 20 years ago. The company that bought them out got bought out, that company then got bought and, and this repeated a few times.

The domain still keeps getting renewed, and for a while redirected to the main page of the largest IT firm in the country. I assume that, along the way of all those acquisitions, domains just kept getting transferred, and nobody knows what those domains are, but it's cheaper to just renew than to find out.

Anyway, it's a fun little reminder of the impact my dad made in this world :)

https://web.archive.org/web/19970409101251/http://www.est.is...

Thanks for the archive link. I was pumping myself up since you didn't seem to name-drop the company. I love these sort of anecdote stories.

Or it may be that the only asset of the company left is a brand and giving out the domain to the world would might make that brand unsellable in the future.

It seems insane to me that the happy path involves you getting $70k. Working in finance, I would expect that amount as a bonus in any year where I perform well and the business isn't unprofitable.

When I've spoken to people about the finance/big tech/startup trade-offs, we've often talked about the upside from startup success (outside of the Google or Instagram case) being around an order of magnitude bigger than that - in the 'pay off your mortgage' ballpark. Is this unrealistic?

I've only got an N of one under my belt, but I'd also note I wasn't a founder or even a pre-series-A employee. I believe the former got more like what you're thinking, and the latter 2x or so what I did. Also I honestly can't recall if that was a pretax or post number at this point.

But on the other end of things... it was still a nice cap on my time there. And even if it's not quit-your-job money, it was still an Everest.

(An Everest being the amount of money it takes to climb Everest, buy a luxury car or a small cabin on a lake, or any other number of reasonably achievable dreams.)

You listed the less-important parts of that story. The important part was what your start-up offered, how it helps the world, and whether the product(s) and the technology went on to be used by many people/organizations or not...

Comparison shopping in the aughts.

There was interesting work on crawling and search, we went bankrupt trying to provide useful tools for people to find different products and the different places to buy them, then became profitable farming our content out for SEO.

We were then bought out by a domain parker who wanted to marry our monetization with his traffic; as far as I know it didn't work, but that was when I left.

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