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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

I think tech founders need to think smaller. Build software for a few thousand people and make a profit from it. Something niche. Something that is sustainable with a small team.

VC eats up everything that's becoming bigger. And they will kill it. Their goal is not to run a healthy business that serves their customers. They try to take out as much money as possible and then trash it.

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This is it. Sustainability. Not everything has to be about more money quickly. You don't even need VCs for that. More win to bootstrappers! I see a lot of folks bootstrapping in the LLM era, but that can be defeaned in the VC noise.

Exactly. And the dangerous mindset tends to be worse than just "more money quickly": it's far too commonly "if this can't become the next Facebook/iPhone/ChatGPT, it's not worth doing." The only options are "take over the world" or "fail"; there's no room (in many people's heads) for a product that makes a decent, steady profit and continues to do so over the course of many years.

There is, is just different capital for those companies (debt, growth equity, angels, grants) and less attention. There’s far more of these types of companies too.

> Something that is sustainable with a small team.

These days, it can be sustainable for a tiny team, named Claude and Luna.

Why doesn't every engineer have a side project or three for small market things of this caliber in 2026?

Because you still need a good sales and product team. Speak with potential customers, understand their problems. Building the software was never the hard part.

They don't give a shit about making a good product, the literal only thing any of these ghouls care about is line going up in the short term, because if line goes up they can dump their investments and move on to the next entity that they can get their greedy claws on and devour.

This is becoming more and more of a problem. For a small software company it could become an asset. Tell customers they are privately owned and small, and therefore won't be acquired by VCs.

Traditionally big vendors were more trustworthy and stable, that's no longer the case.

Edit: I'm not talking about end users, most commercial software is licensed by companies.

In that environment the founder has no hope or reason to go public, making equity in the company worthless.

VC used to push to public exits in order to maximize the founders and VCs stake which turned employees equity to a liquid asset. Truly aligning everyones interests, nowadays not so much.

You're forgetting about dividend, and off-market trade.

If a company is worthless if it isn't public, then IKEA would be absolute garbage. Quite strange for a company making hundreds of millions in profit for its owners.

The insane valuations for selling a dream are what make VC worthwhile.

TSLA would be worth crap if it were a private company giving off dividends. It is really truly about the insane valuations driven by collective delusion.

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