What startups have provided lasting real solutions and value, not just capitalistic, in say the last decade?
Ceph? (Inktank was founded in 2011 by Sage Weil and DreamHost, which then it raised 1M in 2012 from Mark Shuttleworth, then RedHat bought them for 175M in 2014. Seems like a nice startup stort, no? The project itself was started around 2004 by Weil at LLNL, and then he worked on it as part of his PhD still in 2007, then the work continued at DreamHost, probably because Weil is one of the co-founders of DreamHost.)
Deel, Rippling, Redwood Materials, Convoy, Airtable, Anduril, Cerebral, Checkr and Cerebras were all founded since 2014. Pick one. We're currently seeing an explosion in creativity around satellites, autonomous vehicles (on the road, indoors and airborne), generative AI and biotechnology.
Go back one more cycle and we have SpaceX, Tesla, Uber & Lyft, Moderna, Zoom, DoorDash and other giants that entered busy fields, survived the winnowing and basically created a new industry.
Their innovation was abstracting away the complexity of cross-border hiring. Their impact is meaningful to the degree employment is.
This is sort of like saying the iPod was a better Walkman. Yes, you could functionally do the same thing. But no, it wasn't as easy which meant it wasn't as frequently done. (And as a result of pressure from the upstarts, payroll across the board became smoother.)
> Just because they interact with employment doesn't mean they're as important as the whole concept
Nobody said that. I said "their impact is meaningful to the degree employment is." To the people whose roles exist on account of platforms like Deel, their existence is meaningful.
O: AH, no you didn't, you came here for an argument!
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
O: Well! it CAN be!
M: No it can't!
M: An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
O: No it isn't!
You then pivoted to the non sequitur that I “like Deel.” I pointed out that isn’t true, and never needed to be—this was never a discussion about which start-ups we want to put a sticker on. It’s a bit rich to complain about logical fallacies after throwing one out.
You haven't changed my mind but you may have changed others' and you did make me think. Let's have an even better discussion next time.
I took it to mean ignoring companies in sales & marketing or FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate), as well as focussing on the effects of a company's products and services versus their valuation.