Hacker News Reader

Comment by makerdiety | Hacker News Reader

I'm here to tell the tragic truth that there isn't a lot of opportunity for large scale repeatability that happens after the minimum viable product is discovered. Startups are basically cryptocurrency pyramid schemes hidden in the domain of legitimate entrepreneurship.

You shouldn't seek anything that is beyond one order of magnitude higher than the minimum viable product. Because Facebook already exists. World of Warcraft already exists. You're not gonna discover the product-market fit for the next Google. Because there is no next Google.

It's sad how people are being lied to. Startups are literally just another lottery to waste resources, time, and energy on.

The bubble will eventually pop and people will be disappointed with reality.

View on HN

I can tell you how finding PMF went at DigitalOcean. Moisey one of the founders was like "EC2 is expensive and hard to use, lets make it easy and cheap" - then you all used it.

Without AWS there would be no DigitalOcean, and although (much to my displeasure) our CEO often said "we're going to be the next AWS", we really just wanted to be a $500MM ARR alternative.

Not sure if I'm agreeing with you or disagreeing with you tho, hah.

Maybe the next Google or the next Amazon is an inheritable phenomenon that exists on a spectrum? If the next Google is just a class of points within a gradient, and if Google, Facebook, and Amazon are runaway monopolies formed by a stacking of scalable wins like the successful implementation of a theoretical product-market fit framework, then what is a local optimum which is where a perfect neo-Google sits at? And what would be its antithesis (i.e. the local minimum to its corresponding local maximum)?

I call it "Wake building" basically building a business in the wake of a new giant. Amazon was building AWS for itself and for businesses like it. It was inventing cloud services, and it was always going to be complex and expensive. The rest of the industry didn't seem particular bothered to go run behind them, so we did. It was a fine enough strategy I think, the only people I really ever felt I needed to be careful of were Linode and Joyent, so I kept a sharp eye on them, but otherwise yeah, no much to do but listen to how SMB devs didn't want to consume AWS services and build them in a way they did. These days it seems like Matthew and Michelle over at cloudflare have picked that mission up and are doing an amazing job at it, so kudos to that team for sure! :)

That sounds like the generational dynasty of modern American politics. And that's my original point: as birds of a similar feather flock together and start up political parties and enterprises that might eventually become immovable behemoths or peripherals or complements to the giants, other groups don't get to use these now already consumed resources which were used to establish empires, dynasties, and corporations. As a result of the national entropy progressing forward unencumbered, the population that can be sustained in the area, the nation's territories, is decreased, especially as time, now a representative of entropy, progresses. The force that dwindles a land's capacity for life works at a rate where the future is accurately seen as desolate. No investor that is serious about astronomical returns should ever look at planet Earth for keeping a portfolio.

And that's why effective accelerationism was born. To economically and scientifically venture out to new places where money may keep its present value. At the effective science, we have the bravery to investigate conditions considered impossible by the mainstream. We're sailing down a river where the flow is unprecedented and the source of new investments and potentials. A battery of possibilities, even the impossible possibilities.

First: both Blizzard and Google started out as small startups.

I'm curious, if not startups, where do you expect innovation to come from? The things startups do are usually too high risk for large corporations to take on.

No civilization is entitled to technological innovation and economic growth just because it demands it. You have to engineer that goal into reality.

And if you want risk-taking startups and entrenched corporations to work together, you are going to have to devise a communist style government or something. The free markets would just forgo national gross domestic product maximization and line up their own little pockets, free from the top-down authoritarianism required to organize large scale techno-economic activity.

The Roman empire started out as two little baby boys and a momma wolf's teats. Good luck replicating that evolution from zero to hero without the right framework.

Yes there is probably no next Google, but you know what there are a lot of. Companies that the googles etc buy because they have gotten to the point where they can’t really develop new products themselves. So yes you many not be able to make the next Google or Microsoft, but there are plenty of success stories to still be had.

A lifestyle business isn't the success this "black boxed highly performant Product-Market Framework" article is advocating for. A lifestyle business is a small business that is no better than a corner store selling liquor and cigarettes or whatever. The popular trend is to chase after frameworks and technology that enables inhuman commercial growth.

You don't need a Kubernetes cluster for a little gas station business. You also don't even need the concept of a minimum viable product for that "humble" little success which is more probable for the average person to achieve.

Silicon Valley startups want big achievements. Astronomical stuff. That's why MVPs, PMFs, and KPIs were invented. For doing aerospace science as opposed to building local mud huts.

>You don't need a Kubernetes cluster for a little gas station business.

Chick-fil-a has a Kubernetes cluster at each location. Maybe its not so far fetched. Gas stations are all franchises of a major corp.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il7Ww_AlhAg

I don't think being pedantic is appropriate for good discussion.

The lesser point is that, as things like Kubernetes is for large scale software development models, a small business will find it detrimental to copy Google's internal organizations and practices. They don't have the same genetics and they're playing different games.

And, the more important point, there's no room or space for any new, neo-Google to form now. It's over, as they say. The end of history, I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com