Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

> I claim "You can/should start something like AirBnb in a bad economy, but not Google."

Yet AirBnB was born into a good economy (that, in fairness, was on the cusp of going quite bad), while Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad. Not when you start but when your product is ready to ship may be more significant. By the time Google was ready for prime time we were in a good economy. When AirBnB was ready for prime time, we were in a bad economy.

Skate where the puck is going, as they say.

View on HN

> while Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad.

Huh? Google was started in the mid to late 90s (incorporated 1998 but started earlier at Stanford). It was quite literally during the peak years of the dot com bubble and the US economy was doing fantastically well. The Clinton administration was even trying to draw up plans for what to do if the national debt was paid off...

Are you thinking about when Google went public in 2004?

Work on Google started in 1996. While things weren't bad per se, we were still working through recovery from the early 90s recession. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good either. By 1998, when Google was ready to ship, things were quite good.

If, in an alternate universe, work on Google had started in 1998 when the economy was strong and didn't ship until 2000, things could have been quite different. It was no doubt important that they were ready to ship when the economy was at its peak. That means starting when things aren't so good.

Using unemployment as a reasonable signal, I don't think 1996 is that connected to the 1991 recession.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=YUZM

Sure, it was still above 5% in 96 nationally. But strongly down from the summer of 92 peak.

Additionally, Netscape's IPO was in August 1995. I wouldn't call that a bad environment for starting an internet company.

96 is when I got into the industry. There was definitely money and buzz in the air, but it wasn't anything like 99/'00, or other booms that have followed. It was really just the prelude leading up to that, where some infrastructure was being put in place. Online commerce, credit card processing, etc. online was still quite rare. Even in '95, '96 running banner advertising on web sites was still kind of a faux-pas. Media beyond fairly crappy images was non-existent, because bandwidth wasn't there. Actual profitable business models hadn't been proved.

People building Internet infrastructure (Cisco, Sun, etc.) were making some decent money, but actual Internet businesses? Not really.

In fact even by 98, 99, '00, Google itself had no real viable business model. Despite becoming a household name already.

All that's true enough, but do you agree with the original statement:

> Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad.

I don't think being grad students at Stanford and then incorporating in 1998 counts as "just starting to recover". The economy in 1996 wasn't bad. 1998 definitely wasn't.

It was explicitly said that the economy wasn't bad in 1996, just not good either. There is little doubt that the economy was good in 1998.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com