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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

$30M Series A by Tiger in 2018, acq by Fastly in 2022 for undisclosed price, shutdown in 2025. Fastly is a CDN and edge network. Glitch was used by Fastly for “internal training” and “internal sales tools” (kinda?), a far cry from “fullstack application platform in the edge”.

https://blog.glitch.com/post/my-last-day-at-fastly/

https://www.fastly.com/blog/fastly-announces-acquisition-of-...

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is it me or does it feel like the american dream is quickly becoming "work super hard developing a new product that meets people's needs, then get bought out and shut down by one of the supergiant orgs that owns everything"?

Big money exit without concern for what happens next has always been the VC-powered startup dream.

You are probably spending too much time on a discussion forum sponsored by a startup accelerator if you think that defines the American dream, though.

No, that's the Silicon Valley-specific "Sigma Grindset" Dream

This is why civil design software has not meaningfully improved in 20 years and is indistinguishable from its state 10 years ago. We’re living in a Dark Age. We just don’t realize it.

Civil design software?

CAD, GIS, and other stuff you see in civil engineering

You’d have to convince someone to say no to a multimillion dollar VC check, bootstrap themselves financially (and often on “bread and water” levels of available money for their project), and be willing to potentially run or be at least somewhat responsible for whatever they build for potentially decades.

An entity would have to really want to do all that for the “American Dream” to happen.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age

It's going to get worse.

The "American Dream" is really just a less socialist sounding way of describing a post-WWII economic structure where unionized labour (manufacturing, ports, trades and teachers) had bargaining power to hold corporations and elected officials to account. That and a housing sector where government-backed mortgages hadn't yet been turned into a casino by Wall Street.

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