Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else concerned about all these startups catering to other startups? When the VC bubble bursts, the majority of them are going to go up in smoke.

View on HN

We do want to clarify, we can work with businesses ranging from a few hundred orders/ month all the way up to 100,000's of orders. The way our network is set up, we can easily scale up or down the fulfillment needs of our customers. We work with many young businesses today because they need help finding their first warehouse, but we also work with more advanced businesses too.

I am actually less concerned about VC money as it is a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of things, than I am about all the private equity money going into unicorns. The VCs will rock and roll with the funding environment, but the private equity market can go poof in an instant. If (when) it does the fallout will be vey nasty.

The amount of companies / organizations that need fulfillment goes well beyond just startups

Do you think the amount of products being shipped to customers will be shrinking soon?

No. Actually the amount has been increasing exponentially the last few years especially because of fast prototyping due to 3D printing and crowd funding. Additionally many of the new shippers have much different profiles than those before. Finally subscriptions have increased rapidly which is even more shipping.

The last trend is recycling subscriptions e.g. Le Tote which has increased the need for our service. (Le Tote is not a customer).

I might be worried but this seems at the very other end of the spectrum.

The shovel-sellers only make money as long as the gold rush lasts.

Shovels & Levis still seem to be doing well ;)

The whole point of a gold rush is that the big players haven't moved in yet, so there's still room for a single operator to get rich.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com