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Comment by egonschiele | Hacker News Reader

Real bummer of a story.

> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks

It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.

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> Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money.

This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.

I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.

I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations).

SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.

I think it is interesting how now, a lot of the selling to individuals regarding AI is the ability to do what was popular in 2010 (building apps, websites, games) is easy now due to AI. I know so many people who have made workout apps, CRMs, planners, etc. that are baffled by why their work isn't picking up traction (keep in mind, we aren't in SV).

Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.

> Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.

We're already there. It seems like every intern I see has built a custom chatbot with a RAG pipeline integrated into an internal application.

And every legacy SaaS is paying millions in consulting to add the same to their app.

You can still get traction for your workout apps, CRMs etc with the right market research (you need to find a niche) and the right marketing.

There are gazillions of candy crush remakes, but Royal Match, launched in 2021, still made it to the top in revenue. It was not thanks to some existing monopolist pushing it, but thanks to a) ginormous marketing budget and b) relentless execution and experience of making mobile games before, i.e. you know what works, what doesn't, how to extract maximum amount of revenue, etc.

https://naavik.co/digest/royal-match-finding-success-through...

https://naavik.co/digest/why-dream-games-success-is-a-challe...

Many people seemingly have trouble grasping that baselines can shift.

And then they get into mental contortions as to why getting 2x or 3x better in an absolute sense doesn’t budge the needle much.

> It was not thanks to some existing monopolist pushing it, but thanks to a) ginormous marketing budget and b) relentless execution and experience of making mobile games before

Er... so you don't need to be a monopolist, just have a massive amount of existing capital and deep understanding of the field?

An LLM can build novel things if guided by a human with a novel idea.

The issue is that simple and novel can also be copied easily (anyone can just point an LLM at the target and ask it to build a local personal version). The days of making money from this class of app are over.

Novel and very complex ideas will still make money, but outside of gaming are usually niche markets.

Novel and moderately complex apps will have to build their own moats to prevent copying - heavy server side rendering, server logic processing, and an idea that can't be re-implemented on simple CRUD architecture.

Yeah, I was reading along but the date 2010 surprised me.

In reality, you could probably put any date in there and it would work.

I've just been reading The Making of Prince of Persia (highly recommend [1]) and it's amazing how the journal feels exactly like today's startup scene. But everything is dated 1989.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-making-of-prince-of-persia

Another theory is that things has gotten worse as more and more petite bourgeois prospects for class travel lose faith in the invisible hand and turn to pure grift.

And when it comes to culture as festivals they are very much victims of getting hallowed out and sucked dry.

I think the focus on building things is the wrong framing - that seems to be still there. But this AI wave is centered around automation, which has a different flavor to the previous cycles (1970-2010), which very much felt much more positive sum and less hyper capitalistic.

I think there was a time when people who generally went for MBAs started going into CS and other majors angling to get into a tech company. There was also a coincidental proliferation of tech “bootcamps.” I think that’s when things tilted away from technology as a way to improve things to a vehicle to greater riches.

I think the 2008 recession and its aftermath redirected many "Wall Street people" to Silicon Valley.

> This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.

Another perspective is just that SF's culture has been declining for decades. As someone born in SF, I'd agree.

And for me 10 years before that - not in the bay area but in my CS program at UCSD. Going into the junior year in '96 there was a clear inflection point, we suddenly had a flood of finance bro types all over the CS lab as the dot com bubble was quickly inflating.

I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really had to build something real - suddenly you could do it on hype alone and the focus turned to that

It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become

A bummer? Jim, even whilst failing, is living a life better than 99.999% of humans that have ever lived, and surely better than 99% of humans alive today. He has access to SOTA medical care, pharmaceuticals, ideal human weather, healthy and nutritious food on demand at the push of a button, etc.

Let’s keep it in perspective.

Tech startup is one of the few remaining ways still allowed for plebs to build wealth unless they're born into it, because digital stuff isn't influenced by real estate feudalism.

Also why generative AI scares people who want to build wealth with tech, as it removes a vehicle to create moats to build wealth and concentrates existing wealth that can avoid having to hire labor. At least the illusion of meritocracy and skill (versus connection and luck) leading to wealth is evaporating.

As long as there is money people will come just for that. That's where we got tech bros, like finance bros, instead of just a bunch of nerds making cool stuff.

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