The Anti-Startup Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

The Anti-Startup Manifesto

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19 pointsemthos8 comments

This looks like the work of someone very deep inside the tech bubble. I strongly suspect that this kind of "live off of rounds of funding without making any profit" mentality doesn't really exist outside of the tech startups in the bay area.

The mentality does, however due to lack of funding they tend to fizzle out fairly quickly.

I would argue this is actually a bad thing and it's why the Bay Area tends to produce lots of successful tech companies and other areas have trouble with it. Many would-be profitable businesses die out because they lack the funding necessary to get over the initial hurdles of starting a company. The willingness of investors in the valley to throw money at anything is a huge boon to startups - even if it wastes a ton of money in the process.

On the other hand profitability should still be a top goal of a startup - not investment. Many startups seem to have confused the two.

You make a good argument, and I'd only add that during an uptick in the tech sector, it becomes easier to get funding and so a series of effects flow from there. More people get funding, and more of it, and the risk profile and spread changes - probably to include more players that have less chance of success.

For my anecdotal experience I can say I have friends in 2015 who are working for good salary at funded startups that have quite literally no idea what mission or product they are making right now, whereas in 2010 my friends were mostly contributing sweat equity in return for actual equity.

Makes me want to write "anti-manifesto manifesto". If you want to write a manifesto work on it, make it clear, concise, well written. This is drunken mumbling rant, even if the author is right in some parts.

or maybe a song: http://youtu.be/jXoQsS1Bu80 ? :)

Why would we want to return to "the late XIX's century" [sic]? The pain of the Civil War and the invention of cattle drives are tough to connect to the birth of the Internet.

Perhaps this is a form of performance art...

> the late XIX's century

There's a reason it was called the "gilded age" and not the "golden age".

This confirms my (admittedly biased) outsider's perspective of startups, where the goal is not to do something useful or even profitable, but rather to fleece investors or get acquired by some bigger company. A result of this possibly-to-pessimistic perspective is my belief that it is a tragedy that so many smart, talented people, who could be solving real problems, end up in this shell game.

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