The Unicorn Boom Is Over, and Startups Are Getting Desperate
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1) Dependence on proprietary software is at best a short-term support boon, and in the majority of cases a crippling liability when the vendor changes support terms or goes under (personal experience talking).
2) Open source software is a slow but inevitable creep towards feature-matching and quality that has borne ample fruit already.
3) As ephemeral information with near-zero material cost other than labor, software finds most low-hanging fruit quickly, while higher-hanging fruit attract the formation of non-profit foundations to continue development; there just aren't many more interesting software products to offer.
Working business models in the tech industry seem to revolve around the provisioning of hardware because buying software just isn't an appealing proposition to customers in most cases.
Sure, LLMs are interesting software, but they're a perfect demonstration: Open source LLMs already exist and gather huge momentum when released; the field is still so new that novel and efficient solutions are not the exclusive realm of proprietary research; and because of these factors, business models can't revolve around interesting model capabilities so much as provisioning the hardware they run on.
There is plenty of opportunity in boring, unsexy niches. We have enough CRMs and Jira clones though.
However I still sympathize with the parent comment. The niche-industry-exception state of affairs will become less true over time. And then you're left with the same set of incentives (minus dedicated hobbyists).
Note my perspective is colored by working at 2 SF unicorns that had (Airbnb) / have (Notion) a long duration from founding to IPO or from unicorn to IPO. Airbnb seems to be doing okay, so does Notion… neither business ever went off the deep end burning cash for quick growth numbers to wow speculative investors.
I would gladly work for less money for a small company doing something valuable in the real world with realistic ideas about steady, healthy growth. They're tough to find though.
That's 1.5% going public, not 15%.
> Due to the abundance of companies floating on the markets, This decade will introduce a long awaited tech crash that will reset and purge those companies unable to turn a profit. It will get harder for startups to seek capital since most of FAANG and other established companies with strong portfolios will move into novel industries that will invade their market share.
So hardly surprising.
I have seen no real benefit from Silicon Valley for decades. Seems at this point, Silicon Valley is acting kind of like a Ponzi Scheme.
Most recently, Silicon Valley is a grift ecosystem (fueled by zero interest rate policy) masquerading as innovation and a load bearing component of the economy. We can do without unicorns, the world will be better off for it (and legit value will need to be demonstrated vs fairy tale valuations).
(VC as an asset class has poor returns, VC funds make their fees throwing darts pretending to be thought leaders when it’s mostly luck, etc)
It's like the world declaring someone World's Greatest Coin Flipper after and not before that person flips a coin 12 heads in a row.
Note Nissan and GM’s EV offerings today, considering how long they had since then.
(early TSLA investor after a ride in the Roadster)
Compliance car also implies it was the government, not Tesla, dragging them along.
No idea what you’re referring to. Nissan and GM still sell EV’s.
Tesla for all its contributions did not force other automakers into the market.
This isn't entirely correct: both Palm and Apple (the creators of the smart phone) were originally venture-backed.
You seem to be equating "smartphone" with "has third party apps", but that isn't the defining characteristic of "smartphone" based on any common usage.
Besides, when the iOS App Store was launched ~1 year later, the original iPhone was able to use it.
Both the n95 and original iPhone were widely considered to be smartphones at the time! Examples:
https://www.engadget.com/2006-09-26-nokias-n95-smartphone-go...
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...
But virtue of having web browsers they also channel social media. Having social media come in through our phones does make it worse, but it was already bad even on laptops. (Writing this on a social media site using my phone is kind of funny).
LLMs and electric cars simply have zero impact on my life, and I imagine that other people would have had few issues coming up with the latter.