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Comment by plantbased | Hacker News Reader

You're adorable candyjapan. I want to bounce you on my knee. When you eventually run a biz that doesn't just generate millions in revenue but is massively profitable, give me a shout and let me know if you still feel this way.

Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep about half of it.

It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability will go away.

So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea.

In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.

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This is an adorably outdated point of view.

Two ways businesses print money: either be unique and capitalize on tiny amounts of large margins or be popular to capitalize on lots of tiny margins.

If it's popular and is profitable people will copy it. It's not that hard to reverse engineer products, most people just don't bother or try. Give me any CPG brand on the supermarket shelf right now and I can show you the supply chain and equipment needed to manufacture and deliver it.

Everything new gets commoditized eventually, especially considering it's all made in China anyways, and trickles through the global markets at various pacing.

That varying speed is the only competitive advantage one has. Your only job is to stay ahead of the game then when the game is boring sell that information to others to replicate. AKA franchising.

Then you keep spinning and spinning until 30 years later you can stand to wait around while others jump into a new market, burn out, and just take whatever you want out of that situation to come up with a new product and utilize your large economies of scale to immediately sell it in your extended network of retail stores that's making more per square foot than Tiffany's.

But do agree with the second part. Silicon Valley is just a giant R&D college campus built off other people's money experimenting on each other's child like sensibilities.

> either be unique and stand to capitalize on large margins or be popular capitalize on lots of tiny margins.

I love this. Very nicely said.

And you know this from what, exactly?

I've seen far more businesses fail due to traction problems than have succeeded and then been driven out due to margins.

Sure, it's possible--but if you've got 4 dump trucks of money pulling up instead of 5 this week, that's a better class of problem.

Furthermore, other SV businesses fail because they don't charge money.

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