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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see some counterpoints. Which startups have been around for 15 years, took a bunch of VC money, but are as good to their users now as they've ever been?

It's got to be a short list.

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Opposed to that, the list of VC-funded software I'm using and enjoying now, which is nonetheless bound to or already on the way to turning into piles of garbage and wasted potential, is pretty long and it took me not even a minute to put it together.

The ones I care about mostly don't even try to take my money in any reasonable way.

I’ve felt that way in the past. Been productive with VC-backed software and couldn’t imagine using anything else.

Over the years though the case against it gets stronger and stronger. Evernote, Google reader, quora, and picasa are a few off the top of my head that I spent a lot of time with only for it to be abandoned or mutate into something unrecognizable.

The frequency and switching cost of services falling is high enough that now I see it is rational to only work with tools that have a clear part if the product ceases to exist.

Even when new things come out (eg chatGPT), I’m immediately looking for a more long-lasting alternative.

I started Sauce Labs (Selenium SaaS for testing in the cloud) 16 years ago. Raised ~$150MM. Still going.

duolingo? Maybe airbnb?

That's all I've got.

I cannot put my finger on it, but duolingo does not feel as good to me as a user as it felt a few years back. Maybe I have changed, but something does not click the same way.

Duolingo has removed a lot of user generated content that helped people learning. I've heard from many that it is overall worse than it used to be.

I mean Obsidian has only been around 3 years so it seems odd to set the VC bar at 15 years. Plenty of non-VC companies sell out or go out of business in various ways. The argument is likely valid but you'd want data points on both ends.

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