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Comment by nerbert | Hacker News Reader

Personally, growing a startup enough to catch the eye of EU regulators is a problem that I’d like to have.

Doing all the work and taking all the stress only to have the EU remove a chance of growth and exit is a problem that I never want to have. I went through some failed startups, and at least that was our own fault, but still I never want to do that again. I don't know what I'd do in this situation.

Why is "exit" always the goal? Why not go on growing?

Perhaps the founders want to remain there and grow, perhaps they want to focus on something else or retire. Perhaps the plan always was to sell after X years - I don't see anything wrong about that, still better to innovate&sell than just buy stock&sell IMHO.

You can't attract investors if they can't sell in case the investment is successful. This is severely limiting and a terrible situation to be in - especially if you already have investors, who might demand their money back from you - way before your profits could cover it.

And the worst thing that might happen - you design a startup to be acquired by Microsoft/Apple/Google and then EU comes and says no. WTF?

Why would competition law and/or national security laws not apply to a start-up or its acquirers? Why would they or their acquirers get exceptions? Would those exceptions cover patents as well on the national security? What else and why?

Also, this isn't the EU saying "no" at the moment, but looking into it, as it does with many things.

They shouldn't get exceptions. There shouldn't be so many laws and regulations that result in EU being so behind economy-, success- and investment-wise.

Not sure why you think it is the number of laws and regulations that lead to that. The US has huge amounts of those, too.

Some structural differences are in part actually from the US having been less permissive than Europe in banking.

I think that’s the wrong question too

Even growth should be questioned holistically when you can literally make a few million dollars once and be done with it

instead of every quarter while pretending that making the same or lesser amounts are disasters

Few million dollars split by how many people? A small startup that provided a decent exit for me was sold for 50M EUR. I got 100K from that - the company had over 1000 shareholders. That's not really life changing amount of money, was barely enough to get a mortgage for my small apartment (30% of the price).

BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's just grow I guess".

Ideally just 1

If thats not your circumstance then it doesn't apply to you

I’m not the person that thinks there is anything wrong with selling shares, or failure, by the way

I would just rule out very many ideas to pursue at all, and encourage others to do the same.

They're not mutually exclusive.

But founders and employees at some point want to leave and do other things. They want to take their stake in the company and sell it to buy a house or retire or pay for their kids' college or whatever.

That requires an exit, either as an acquisition or an IPO.

(In theory, dividends or profit distributions are an alternative, but they're much harder to do anything with because they're mostly in the future and not guaranteed. You can't pay for your kids' college with future profit-sharing that may or may not materialize. And, dividends or profit distributions are the opposite of growth, because you're no longer re-investing in the company.)

Why is "growing" always the goal? Why not go on sustaining?

Because sustaining is a job, and it's a very hard job. The shareholders might not like that job or want to do a different one, or they just can't do it. Or the market is going down, but someone could use the IP/assets/team.

> Because sustaining is a job, and it's a very hard job.

... and infinite growth is neither of those?

Who said infinite? Startup founders that got investments have designed the exit points based on market conditions, and nobody would trust "infinite". It's just like stock investments (unless you "invest" based on feelings, of course) - you calculate the risk, the potential, and then you decide. Nobody reasonable puts "infinite growth" into their Excel sheets.

And yes, growing until that exit point is a lot of work - so it makes total sense people want an exit at some point.

The market expects infinite growth. Imagine what would happen if a publicly-traded company announced that they would stop pursuing growth.

No, that's not true. There are plenty of stable market capitalization, dividend-generating public companies. Their cap-to-EBITDA ratio is much smaller, but that doesn't change the fact.

Of course everybody expects the company to take advantage of opportunities - but it has to make economical sense. Nobody wants their company to try to grow so hard the whole company crashes.

Of course it doesn't expect infinite growth. Companies _aim_ for it, but nobody expects them to do it.

> Why is "growing" always the goal? Why not go on sustaining?

We're talking about a nascent field. Sustaining means holding the status quo while others lap you in capability and cost.

Because speculative startups require a lot of investment/venture capital, but the VCs need a defined return at some point. They need an exit with a sale, an acquisition or an IPO in order for the whole process to make financial sense. If companies just 'grow' but never sell out, there's not enough return for VCs, so they don't invest. No investment = way less startups to begin with

Especially important if you want to compete in training base models - if they were using 1500 H100s like the quote somewhere above implies, the market rate for that right now is something like $7500-$10k per hour (retail, on demand, so probably lower in reality, but still, it adds up incredibly quickly if you’re training 24 hours per day).

> Why is "exit" always the goal?

The goal should be whatever the creator wants.

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