Hacker News Reader

Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.

I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…

Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.

View on HN

You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.

They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.

Monopolies prevent startups from reaching critical mass.

Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could form.

Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease, kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax non-innovation.

We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.

More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.

That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.

I wholeheartedly support antitrust enforcement. My comment was mostly about VC firms having very specific opinions on what should happen.

Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. They get rich and pawn their money losing investments to the “bigger fool”

https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...

> In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%

And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public

VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller startups all the time?

You can compete with a unicorn. You can't compete with a trillion dollar company with a cash hoard larger than every unicorn.

Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide, caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor" in this very brief.

The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.

> Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble.

I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech.

Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion.

Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor to.

Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that take risks. They're the ones that should see upside. Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.

They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech.

So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money.

And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.

That's a low ceiling.

Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3 years out of school is a “low bar”?

Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.

People act in furtherance of their interests, yes. Was there more you had meant to say?

"People act in furtherance of their interests, yes" [by invoking the power of the State].

There, FTFY. It was implied, was it not?

Perhaps that is what should happen here, but let's not quibble about it.

"Invoking the power of the state?" Good heavens, they've only filed an amicus brief. "Begging the presently authorized tenant of a precisely defined and circumscribed aliquot of the delegated power of the state" would be a more accurate way to put it. I appreciate that's not as florid, nor as floridly serviceable to anyone else's interest in pursuing this conversation. As I said before, though...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com