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Comment by tossandthrow | Hacker News Reader

IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia.

Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.

For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.

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> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.

I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.

> The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.

Bozo brainrot

I highly agree. And I think in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. I think part of the reason why is that all over social media and the internet there are gurus telling people "you can be the next to be rich and you deserve it". But that's the wrong motivation to have ingrained in every potential founder.

> in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product.

If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.

Free market thinkers here would say this is the market working as intended.

Free market thinkers should realize that market doesn't work as intended - it just works. POSIWID[0] and all. The workings of the market are sometimes aligned with the best interest of humanity, but not always, and they have no obligation to be, because at this point, we've long lost any control we had over it (if we ever had any).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

I believe that's not really saying anything if the market is intended to work by the forces of the invisible hand. If it is, the it is working as intended.

If you believe that, you're effectively believing that a runaway system of feedback loops is right by definition. But that's basically just a religion that worships a non-personified deity.

You can tell that to the free market faithful.

I was merely pointing out that saying the market 'just works' instead of it 'working as intended' logically doesn't add anything, because in the free market concept it is meant to to "just work", which implies that is what it is intended to do.

Sure, but in the real world, there aren't that many true believers in the Free Market. There's just a lot of people confused about what the market is, and it's useful to help them realize that it's just a name we give to a complex set of feedback loops. There is no intention behind them - it's just what happens when people do stuff people do. It is not a moral authority, and it does not magically limit itself to trading dollars for food or sex either - we limit it to that conceptually, by drawing a border and then regulating it to stay away from the other things.

A truly free market just degenerates into the "natural state" in which non-social animals live. There is, nor there ever will be, a truly free market in a human society. The only intentional thing, the only thing we can discuss whether it "works as intended" or not, is the boundaries (cultural and regulatory) we set around the market. It's the only thing we control (sort of - the same feedback loops that form the market also affect our attempts at regulating it).

> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.

Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that would make execution seem like the place to focus?

An experienced person might hear the idea and instantly have a general idea of how to build it -- but know that the real hard parts are distribution, finding customers, talking to customers, and building the profit flywheel that lets you do more of the previous.

Taking AI as an example just because it's hot right now, but it's a very different conversation if your idea is building a alternative to the transformer (assuming you're talking to someone who could even speak authoritatively on the subject!), versus building an "chatgpt wrapper" app, even if it's very complex/tailored to an industry. Most people won't be able to discuss the industry specific bits so they focus on the tech bits, and then the differences seem to be mostly execution?

When I pitch my calorie counter app that uses AI - fair, that is not new.

But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techniques in FL that still yields good results. ...

In honesty, I think the main issue is that the people have _not_ been able to understand these technologies. It has probably been _too_ innovative?

> and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that"

I believe one cause for this response is how someone tells the other person about that idea. If you make it clear that you are building something for fun, I think that response becomes less likely. But if they believe your project idea is also a start up idea, then they may ask about the business side.

Sometimes I do see a cognitive dissonance when computer-first people and business-first people discuss software. IMO, making it clear where the person starting the conversation is coming from would help both groups not talk past each other when engaging. A startup-minded person won't necessarily ask about monetization if the other person made it clear they're talking about a hobby. I believe it would be less likely, at least.

> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns

That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.

I think this is in part a market correction. Whether it's over correction, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

There's been a lot of really bad startups making a big splash, often without any experience or knowledge of the field they were trying to disrupt (so they don't actually know what the problems really are, or what was really needed), and with far too vague hand wavey ideas on how they'll actually reach sustainability.

There's been far too much of engineering being a hammer, and seeing every problem is a nail

> every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.

Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.

A big trend in science now, at least for those less fortunate researchers, is basically only being allowed to do research that you already know the outcome of.

So whats next?

We all run a Startup. It's called your own Career...

> entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed

If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing.

No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.

So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagined scale.

Well, it is a narrow understand.

I also don't focus solely on the fact that I earn money from my job, when I speak to my colleagues - no, I wouldn't be on that job, if it didn't pay.

> No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.

This is a very specific understanding of startups as entities receiving foreign capital or debt.

The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives - or should be IMHO. Money is what makes it possible and not the core reason to do it.

And by that we return to my core reservation as written out in the initial comment.

> The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives

I am assuming one is operating in the for-profit sector.

If one is NOT operating in that sector then yes it is all the more reasonable to assume that the enterprise should be focused on solving a problem or creating some sort of intangible value.

We can observe this is well with the open-source community, where profit motivation is not the main driving factor.

However, I reiterate, if the venture is to operate for-profit then it's potential to be profitable should be for most the aim otherwise it's not solving a problem because it will fail.

VCs aren't banks and startups (in the SV sense) aren't seeking funding to do something tried and true in a new place. A VC invests expecting most of their investments to fail.

Banks expect returns, and the things they fund are expected to turn a profit. There are systems in place to claw back assets and funds in the event it fails to do that; and most will, but they're expected to come to the bank with a plan for profit in hand. There are different kinds of bankruptcies to address different kinds of failure. Banks tend to not give loans to people who fail a lot, and the terms get worse with each failure.

Meanwhile, in VC-land, the 1/10 startup that brings the profit for the fund could very well be started by the person who failed the other 9/10 times.

It seems like if the expectation is, with rare exceptions, most startups won't turn a profit, and there's no real penalty or punishment for repeat failure (because it's expected), it's not a for-profit system. It's a patronage system that periodically mints new patrons.

I disagree.

The VC is there for profit because they expect the 1 win to overshoot the loss from the other 9.

They expect potential for profit in all the ventures they invest. Period.

And they put forth capital in the amount representative of their belief that a particular venture will turn a profit.

Those they believe have more potential will receive more funding/resources than those ventures that seem less favorable.

They are not, as you put it, performing in a patronage system, because simply they are not interested in losing their capital.

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