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Comment by Oarch | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much longer this logic can hold. I have equity in the startup I'm at. It's a very complex platform and in a niche / emerging market.

Yet could AI feasibly generate a similar (or better) app in a few years? It used to be unthinkable. Now, I'm not so sure.

The development cost of software could feasibly drop to negligible levels. It no longer seems like sci-fi, more and more it seems like the inevitable direction of travel.

What happens to my equity? Welp. Might not be great news.

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There’s more to a successful business than masking an app.

A lot of acquisitions are made by companies that could re-build the acquired product themselves. They’re buying the business, brand, and customer base, not the app.

This isnt true, nobody knows what will happen when you can very cheaply replicate software. The sales etc are valuable, but when the cost of producing the product goes to zero, weird things will happen.

Who says the cost of producing software is going to zero?

It's likely heading towards that direction.

Just seeing how Veo3 has taken huge chunks of value out of the film/production space in the last week. It's going to be very hard to justify many salaries going forward.

This is magical thinking. If you could clone Facebook tomorrow your platform wouldn’t be worth anything without established business processes, network effects, and goodwill.

line of business saas is absolutely vulernable. the biggest companies on the planet are not under thread. SAAS companies worth 100M-300M are absolutely vulnerable

This has nothing to do with your original claim.

Always treat startup equity as 0 until you've sold it.

Correct. The motivation for equity comp should be more of "I want to change the world" than the "I want big money". The odds are very against it.

Here's some older stats (2017) https://berkonomics.com/?p=2899

But searching, you'll find loads more studies on startup/angel/seed.

It's like, optimistically, 1/20

Good advice! Thankfully I do want to change the world (for the better I hasten to add) and so far so good.

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