TV series about startup failures
1984.design
1984.design
I'll have to check out this Halt and Catch Fire everyone is talking about!
It seemed to turn 100% drama, no tech. I couldn't get past episode 2 of the last season!
I think it also reminds me of how the web changed my interaction with my computer. Of course I was in front of it more, but it made it more about other people and sharing information than just me, alone working on my algorithm.
I didn't see this, and according to wikipedia, this was in the second last episode. This makes sense, because (as I indicated) I stopped watching at season 4, second episode.
And I had to fast forward through loads of "he said / she said" drama and people arguing about personal "stuff" to even get to the end of episode 2.
Like I said, first season rocked. 2 and 3 I watched, although 3 was harder to get through. 4 was just a soap opera, and citing the second last episode as 'something tech happened!', doesn't make me feel wrong here.
Anyhow, to each their own. You can tell what I don't like, others may have more tolerance, or even enjoy more drama orientated dialog.
I still think abut it frequently. It's true. It's a statement about systems - often the utility is what they enable, not thing "thing in itself".
Even deep into software development, this is true. e.. I really appreciate git and github, but I don't need to focus on becoming a "git maestro" , I just need to get by in git, because git for me "isn't the thing", it's just "the thing that gets me to the thing".
Likewise, we can make software for people who are clever, even brilliant in what they do but who don't care abut the details of that software because for them it's not "the thing".
The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just computer enthusiasts; computers would be the way to get there, but are not the thing itself.
Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.
He is totally chasing the shiny new thing that the others don't even see yet. Even as they bring it about.
It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.
But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.
Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.
It seems like very much a comment about the broader ecosystem being a bigger factor than an individual device.
The most common one is probably pointless redesigns. Outside of games, users usually aren't pulling up a particular app for the pleasure of using it, they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.
I feel much the same way about git.
I feel like Spotify’s value is mainly to the big 3 music publishers to gain negotiating power against Apple/Alphabet/Amazon. It has existed since 2006, and still losing money. And lots of it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
It's a fucked up system, but it seems most companies go through this.
Unless Spotify obtains copyright for all the popular music in the world people want to listen to, or media or whatever, I do not see how this is a possibility.
Currently, Spotify has to buy from the 3 big music publishers (which limits the amount of expenses it can reduce), and it sells to people who have the option from buying from at least 4 streaming services which are relatively trivial to switch to (which limits the amount of revenue they can earn). The exact opposite of the situation you want your business to be in.
Sure, not all songs are available everywhere, but there is at least some coverage. Apple Music seems to have pretty widespread coverage too (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411) but I could find at least a few places I visited recently where it wasn't available while Spotify was (Bangladesh and Haiti are two examples)
In any case, looks like Tidal has never earned a profit, but was bought by Block for $300M a couple years ago for unknown reasons. I cannot imagine that worked out for Block shareholders.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/03/08/square-just-bought...
> At best, analysts estimate the company has 5% of the music streaming market
> it has lost money every year since it started
Also, Amazon didn’t go 17 years without profit. Is there any company that went that long and then went profitable?
I like Spotify, but do they even have a roadmap to profitability? Are they even projecting profitability any number of years out?
There were a lot of parallel threads in the early 80s that didn't really intersect a lot. You had the PC/BBS world, the ARPANET/Internet, and the minicomputer & mainframe worlds.
I knew a lot of the people in Soul of a New Machine and actually dotted-lined into Tom West for a while. (Later on when Data General was coming out with big Unix servers.)
I don't think I quite made it to the end of HaCF as it's not available (legally) on non-premium subscriptions. I'll have to hunt it down.
Is that true? They are still losing money after, what, 10 years?
I like Spotify but I don’t think they are out of the woods yet.
Just like I wouldn’t call WeWork (isn’t a failure) in 2018.
Losing $22B is a pretty insane failure.
Highly recommend.
It later made it into season 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Rescue
I know a guy that goes in and rescues bars in exchange for a percentage of the increase in value as they're later sold. He swears that the core of what Taffer does is exactly how he operates.
And what about "Citizen Kane" [4]? The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg's biography. Have not watched entirely the last ones about Steve Jobs, I don't think they captured the real character and complex personality.
Bigger lists tagged startup in IMDB [5] and company [6]. Most of them are based on fiction.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_v_Ferrari
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Kane
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15469192/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_8_tt_...
Margin call would be a better example in my opinion.
Also kitchen nightmares/hotel hell for companies. It would be a hit, but without the woke American additions; just go full Ramsey UK style.
That's a great idea, would love that. What founder with experience has a good enough style/personality for this to work? Jobs sounds like he would be perfect for this, he loved berating people. But who could do the job today? Most founders today are too vanilla for it be interesting, at least their public persona.
"Yeah, so things started going south a little after we collected 2 mil in our series A.."
Like imagine if The Weakest Link lady had had a midwestern accent or something, it wouldn’t have become a thing.
So imagine. Instead of building good and sound startups that can be champions in the country/region, they waste the meager resources available in the country on fake startups/crypto-scams.
Sad.
I have worked in few startup incubators, and most of the companies I've seen are merely interested in getting a good evaluation and getting bought from someone else.
The amount of startups I've seen with the interest of actually making any "profit" is very low.
I think this is also a reflection of several changes in how stock markets have changed in the last decade where the name of the game hasn't been anymore about making a successful product that makes money and possibly pays dividends but the chase for endless and endless growth of stock price.
There are companies out there that literally have the stock of their price in the hall of their offices, imagine that and not customer satisfaction/retention/profits or anything else being the biggest indicator of a company's success.
It's a sad reality.
I myself am interested in creating a new business in the tech world, one that makes honest good money but is not seeking a 100M/1B valuation and I feel such a unicorn.
I just don’t know who exactly to blame for that. It seems to be a competition between gov spending, “quantitative easing” (brrrrrrrrrt), and the Fed’s insistence that near zero percent rates forever would work. It seems to me that all of those cause the other though.
I hope it works out, because seriously the last decade plus shouldn’t have gone down the way it did.
Startup incubators seem like they would be biased towards those looking for an easy pre-paved path. I participated for one in university and less than half of that cohort was interested in ever making money or getting traction at all, including myself.
We were there to polish our resumes for job hunting upon graduation.
My team didn't make a single sales call or engage with a single customer. The program managers brought us an extremely large potential government contract (15 million) and we turned them down as it was after the program ended and we were planning to be job hunting.
If we get that recession, we could see those rates reverse and end up negative again before too long.
> So imagine. Instead of building good and sound startups that can be champions in the country/region, they waste the meager resources available in the country on fake startups/crypto-scams.
So is the problem here just that your country has fewer resources?
There are plenty of rich people in developed countries who could be champions of the country/region but waste the resource available on sociopathic business models which are absolutely as predatory as crypto scams, all while dodging taxes, drawing on corporate welfare, and creating lower-paying jobs that displace higher-paying jobs.
Nobody likes a crypto scammer, but I'd argue that the average large-scale landlord in the US does far more damage.
Its a systemic failure of the organizational networks and legal structures that should bring people together, with the right incentives, to develop lasting solutions. People dont need billions to get incentivised. There is nothing wrong with building a small company that fits a niche. The unicorn mania is deeply sick.
There is so much knowledge nowadays, so much talent - before we even get to augmented powes using tech - that the situation will start bordering on the insane.
The challenge is that financial-economic systems are so tightly tied to power that they cant evolve. What is clearly needed in many parts of the world, and definitely in silicon valley, is to dismantle the adulation of super-sized entities, ultra rich etc. and encourage a strong middle class and SME enterprize. This was always the backbone of stable and prospering societies.
That in turn covers the outlay by venture money. All those companies that burn money in fire pits are essentially subsidized by the staggering amount of money that some new companies only recently formed in the past 20 years are printing.
Spray and pray and see what sticks for investors will work in this type of rapid revolutionary environment.
The crop that came after that (Uber/Airbnb/Snap/etc) do not show the same, except maybe Bytedance, but their numbers are not public.
YouTube, instagram, Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc. all second generation software that companies that were acquired by bigger companies as exits, or to squelch competition.
Love it, hate it, whatever, but it completely revolutionized what is practically access to "everything". You will be hard pressed to find an American consumer, from the richest guy to homeless people on the street that don't have a mobile communications device on their person with a touch screen and instant access to the collective works of the world.
The iPhone by itself as a stand alone business would be larger than Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds among other revolutionary businesses.
Maybe (maybe) ChatGPT will do something similarly transformative (I’m sus as the kids say).
Last ten years? Maybe something in deep learning.
LLMs/generative AI could be game changing although I'm somewhere on the fence between this year's hype and this will change everything. Autonomous driving could be pretty radical as well but it would have to be pretty general purpose and that doesn't seem close to reality.
We are in a transformative moment right now with GPT3 onwards, as great as anything in the computer era.
However… I don’t think it counts exactly. When you look at the trillions that have been dumped into basically “ take the best and brightest in the world, and then get them to increase advertising performance by 1% a year” and the money effort and time put into AI, thst the big players were caught completely off guard by AI, it’s more of a mistake than an organic technology evolution.
Other than AI, what seriously happened in the last decade? Where in terms of user product has tech innovated?
I'm not convinced.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/froth.asp
And now we are about to get AI froth that will follow the same Gartner hype cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
I wonder where you guys would place us now? I’d say Peak of Inflated Expectations since every other story on HN is about AI or large language models.
> "expert medical analyses and reports regarding the defendant’s prior brain surgery and its continued neurological impacts ... cast doubt upon the requisite legal element of intent to commit the charged offense.” [2]
> Miller had undergone brain surgery several years ago after having a hemorrhage and multiple seizures. He said “a golf ball-sized” piece of his frontal lobe was removed.[1]
[0] Conjecture based on knowledge of neuropsychology
[1] https://deadline.com/2021/07/t-j-miller-bomb-threat-charge-d...
[2] https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/tj-miller-WM...
TJ Miller (Erlich)
Martin Starr (Gilfoyle)
Zach Woods (Jared)
Kumail Nanjiani (Dinesh)
(in roughly this order)
[Honorary mention: Henry Phillips (John, the datacenter guy)]
I think this show exemplified the power of a good ensemble. Any one of the characters would have been annoying by themselves, but put them next to each other and it’s hilarious
Also he looks like a good blend of Mark Zuckerberg / Jesse Eisenberg.
Aviato is a prequel to the HBO hit TV show, Silicon Valley. The story follows the journey of a young entrepreneur, named Nelson "Nate" Chatwin, who wants to make a name for himself in the world of tech. He dreams of building a company that will disrupt the airline industry and make air travel more accessible to everyone.
The story is set in the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its early stages and startups were popping up all over Silicon Valley. Nate is working as a software engineer at a startup, but he is restless and wants to do something more. One day, while sitting in a coffee shop, he overhears a conversation between two pilots about the challenges of booking flights. That's when he has a Eureka moment and comes up with the idea for Aviato - an online platform that connects travelers with affordable flights.
Nate starts working on Aviato in his spare time, but he soon realizes that he needs more help to bring his vision to life. He recruits a group of talented engineers and business-minded individuals to join his team. Together, they work tirelessly to build the Aviato platform from scratch. They encounter numerous challenges along the way, from funding issues to technical glitches, but they never lose sight of their goal.
As Aviato gains popularity and investors start pouring in, the team faces new challenges. Nate struggles to balance his work and personal life, as his marriage falls apart due to his obsession with the company. The team also faces pressure from rival startups and industry giants, who are threatened by Aviato's disruptive business model.
Throughout the series, we see the rise of Aviato and how it becomes one of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley. We also see the personal and professional sacrifices that Nate and his team make along the way. The series ends with Aviato's launch and its early success, setting the stage for the events that unfold in the original Silicon Valley series.
Overall, Aviato is a compelling story about the power of innovation, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and the human cost of building a successful startup. It's a must-watch for fans of Silicon Valley and anyone interested in the tech industry.
The interesting thing about the doco is that the film maker seems to get converted midway. At the start the founder is portrayed as a obvious charlatan but by the end he is presented in a much more favorable light.
Highly recommend.
I think sports teams and accomplishments still take this competition by a long shot. There are way more movies, books, time spent mythologizing teams and individuals doing sporting things.
https://watchdocumentaries.com/enron-the-smartest-guys-in-th...
A bit of hyperbole there. It was only used in some Walgreen's in Phoenix.