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Comment by scrubs | Hacker News Reader

I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.

The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.

Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned."

The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left.

Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed

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> The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.

If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.

I know someone who is an accountant for very wealthy people and quite a few seem to have useless children whose failing businesses they bankroll.

Startups are like sports cars nowadays. People think it makes you look cool if you own one.

It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.

> whose failing businesses they bankroll

Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business.

Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.

Semantics. If the hobby business never makes a profit and is capturing losses for tax benefits, that’s a failing business. It can be failing indefinitely as long as there’s money to support it, but you can’t call it a successful business.

You appear to be suggesting that fun hobbies which don't make money are a 'failure' rather than a success. Not everything is judged by how much money it makes.

Have you ever wondered why kids climb trees?

It's really not that deep: they're characterising the business, you're characterising the hobby. The owner having a good time doesn't make it a successful business. A failing business can be a successful hobby, sure, that's still a failing business.

This wasn't a hobby. At least the head engineer and sales persons were constantly stressed by flagging sales and lack of customer acceptance.

It wasn’t a hobby for them but it still may have been a hobby business for the founder. Rich dude LARPing tyrant CEO or Steve Jobs imitator is common.

Doesn't running consistent losses eventually cause tax issues with the IRS? If the losses are offsetting profit elsewhere, I would assume the IRS would become very interested in challenging the validity of the hobby business?

You see a lot of hobby shops in ultra-wealthy areas of major metropolises. Tiny art studios, interior decorators with a handful of items in stock, boutique fashion shops.

> robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.

I have been on the other side of this, building a frontend that connected to an external service robot that we, with a 5 minute script, managed to successfully prove internally was just a if/then/else state machine.

We got paid to make it, so we didn't care, but we knew someone was losing money.

fwiw, you’ve perfectly described the feeling of working for a “tax write-off” and how to recognize those vibes.

It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a fraud! But it’s merely a business designed to lose money. It won’t land you in jail but it’s not a place anyone would advance a career.

I can't wait for these AI companies to IPO and be harpooned.

Why wait for IPO? Prediction markets already let non-US persons bet on startup stock prices while the startup is still private. Eg a few weeks ago you could have used a non-US VPN, shorted spacex, and lost all your money :)

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