Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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> The company is the product.

If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.

Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.

Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.

Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).

Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).

A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.

Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?

There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.

It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.

In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.

A lot of the time I feel like the software economy is just a bunch of well-moneyed individuals betting on horses.

They are betting on whether richer people will bet on the same things so they can cash out. Repeat, all the way up.

The entire economy is to some degree a casino betting on itself. I think this is always true to an extent but the casino nature becomes much more dominant the more unbalanced things become.

I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat

You must not know many rich people if you think addiction is not an issue for the wealthy. The drugs of choice are less immediately destructive, but cocaine, pills, MDMA and ketamine are all wildly abused by the 1%.

All humans are susceptible to addictions and addictive behavior, but the 1% that you mention are mostly shielded from their negative effects. It's far less of an issue for them, and it's not even just about choosing the less destructive drugs. If we talk about just drug addictions, their wealth ensures that:

1. They always have a reliable supply of their preferred drug. No matter how much they need, many of them will be able to afford it pretty much indefinitely. They can just live with the addiction.

2. They have first-class healthcare to mitigate the addiction and lessen its side effects.

3. They have the power to never run into any legal trouble over it. How often do 1%s get convicted on drug possession? This often applies even to the harshest regimes.

So, referring to what the other commenter said, the wealth inequality also affects addicts unequally. The rich, excluding the most extreme exceptions, are immune to the downward spirals of addictions and many of their consequences. The poor addicts become increasingly desperate as their drug habit consumes most of their income and savings. The poorest turn to the cheapest, most dangerous street drugs. Many get little to no medical help. Many are charged with drug-related crimes, ensuring their criminality keeps them down for the rest of their lives. This varies by country, but the patterns are all similar.

There's always going to be an underlying layer of people who tend to gravitate towards addictions, rich and poor - the real question is if more and more people are turning to them as they get desperate, who wouldn't otherwise have.

That is a fundamentally different argument than the one GP was making.

Yeah, I agree, sorry. I went on a bit of a tangent, but still wanted to post it. But hey, I tried to bring it back in the last sentence.

Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.

Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering

the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.

The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.

Well maybe we can agree that addiction is a form of escapism, and the question then becomes why do people want to escape their current situations?

which you'll bring back to "in general, it's about wealth inequality", except that plenty of poor people aren't addicts.

> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

-H.L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken? You sure about that one?

though the wording is different, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/ says yes

> if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis...about your company, you will not succeed.

Halfway true. There's a famous quote:

> In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.

In the short run if you can get acquired then the long run fundamentals don't matter. They just become noise in some larger company's financial statements.

They might not matter anymore for you, but they still exist, which is the sentiment the relevant sentiment for the quote.

This is such a boring dytopia. Everything is just a grift at this point.

In the limit that might be fine, the problem is the amount of damage caused in the meantime and the constraints that puts on future trajectories.

Only for those left holding the heavy, heavy bag.

> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.

The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".

Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action. My very personal opinion is this is more psychological than scientific.

No, the reason is because these "crashes" are very small so on average you lose more trying to avoid them than just staying invested. The emotional part is trying to avoid them, the rational part isn't.

> Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action.

Inevitable when you tie the pension of people to the performance of the stonk markets.

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