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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like another symptom of zirp/cheap money.

Lots of ideas that could have been a neat feature or tool somehow ended up raising $500M of funding with no viable plan on ever monetizing.

The fact that the product is successful but after a decade they barely make $50M/year of revenue against $500M of lifetime funding is crazy. As a user, you can work at a company with a billion in revenue and barely owe them a few thousand/year. Or you might just use Podman for free, and prefer it due some of the design differences.

At the very least, a lot of these firms, with VC pressure, overstayed their welcome as private enterprises and should have sold themselves to a larger firm.

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Some time ago I learned that Postman Labs that produces a nice but not-a-rocket-science HTTP client raised $433M at multi-billion valuation and has 500 employees. Isn't it astonishing?

Postman's strength is not in the HTTP client part. It is in the SaaS part, ad I think their valuation (even though overblown) mostly reflects their corporate penetration and the willingness of many companies to pay a small amount for their services.

The SaaS part being the offering for creating developer.acme.com type pages?

No.

Centralizing and sharing your API descriptions, test suites and plans, the various ad-hoc queries people usually keep in their notes or on Slack (and lose), handling involved auth stuff which is a hassle with curl, etc.

I think they gravitate towards the same area as swagger.io or stoplight.io, but from the direction of using the existing APIs.

API schemas and test suites are usually stored as code in some sort of SCM. I googled "postman maven" and "postman gradle" and found nothing official so I guess they have nothing except stand-alone workspaces.

API registry is a useful tool with modern love for nanoservices when a team of five somehow manages ten of those but I don't see anything similar done by Postman. Two of the service registries I know of were implemented in-house for obvious reasons.

Do you also mean things like Uber? with double digit $B lost with no road to be profitable? I agree.

And Lyft... and Doordash... and GrubHub...

Pretty much the entire "gig economy" is full of hot air and survives on regular influxes of VC money despite massive losses every year. The business model doesn't frickin work.

The hope from investors was that they would be investing into what would ultimately become a monopoly that could extract rents to repay them (not very competitive market of them, but that's tipping the hat a little isn't it...) but the funny bit is there's like 5-7 competitors in the US alone doing the same thing.

Here's a take: maybe this is just a natural monopoly situation, and if we like the convenience of gig delivery but don't like the high prices per order or that gig workers don't get sufficient pay, health insurance or other benefits, how about we just nationalize it?

You know, the same way we did for everything that wasn't food or groceries before? USPS Courier service sounds like an idea to me.

Nationalize it? No way. Besides I like rich investors ponying up money so my ride/food is more convenient and cheaper! It won’t last, but then what does?

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