Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

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I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.

I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.

I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.

So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.

I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.

The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.

In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)

More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?

This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.

I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.

The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.

Most of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things

in evolutionary biology, almost all cells die, but some of those that survived evolved to become humans

Strictly, no? No cell has been alive through that whole process. Rather, many laid the foundations that lead that direction.

Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?

I'm not a biologist but I thought there are no new cells, just old cells splitting.

The next logical steps to this is eugenetics, I'll pretend I didn't see this comment

BTW, we already tried that and it didn't work

They wont because they're propped up by tax payer money :) the very thing they whine about.

absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.

Those sound like contractors, so a private company that's failing here? Or am I misreading?

Meta spent how many billions on Metaverse and has what to show for it? Some argue it was wasteful.

sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of

The problem is not the government being inefficient and wasteful but the contractors -- aka private companies -- being inefficient and wasteful.

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