svengrunner2049

It is a good product, so we're tying to put our org in a position to pay for it. But I really don't like this model of intentionally frustrating or obfuscating whether it is open source or not, or not listing/hiding what is or isn't in enterprise vs OSS versions. For example, the fact that starting off open source (assuming you succeeded running the maze of figuring out how to run it), explicitly blocked the path to goto enterprise is a shame, and seems like a bit of a missed business opportunity.

We'll probably see more of these faux OSS projects who hoped for some community/network effect from being OSS to translate into either strong donations or considerable uptake of their enterprise/cloud/managed versions go this route.

To be clear, fully support charging for and paying for SaaS. Would just like be able to know what is in front of me when making build/buy decisions.

Not to single you out JohnFen, but I'm seeing this take in many places, and it is very wrong. The risk here is being attributed to the wrong place. A startup checking account should be low risk, it is just plain cash as it comes in from sales and/or funding round investments. No derivatives, no funky illiquid stuff, just cash. The activities of the startup _may_ be risky, and it can totally fail because of that...by running out of cash, that should be safely and easily available in a deposit account. A startups cash can hit zero, but they expect to be able to access it so that it can hit zero!

So the argument that by the mere fact SVB banked startups as customers was more risky than big banks is not quite precisely right, as big banks have business accounts and plenty of startup customers too. But as other comments have mentioned things were often made quite hard for them there, and SVB was the better product to startups...as just a literal checking account for day to day operations.

The giant risk management failure was in how SVB managed the deposits and indeed the mismatch of the assets it held against them. We all know the long dated UST issue now. Their deposits ballooned so quickly over the last 18mo, the mistake was to put them into such long locked up bonds immediately. A better approach could have been to assume that money could "come out as fast as it came in", and to have held shorter duration securities, shorter maturity bonds, money market funds, repo market commercial paper etc. Then as the steady state pattern emerges post this influx of deposits, then make a better risk management based decision of what proportion to now put in longer dated assets, medium dated assets and shorter dated ones.

And above this specific risk, clearly in hindsight, there was an overall systematic risk in having a non-diversified customer base who all consume the same information sources, highly networked and correlated with each other in their behaviour.

Microsoft and OpenAI, Google losing $100bn from a bad demo, layoffs, cost cutting pressure to innovate again... I feel the days of full openness in AI research from corporations are over.

There is a lot of truth to all these observations. Would have just seemed anecdotal points even just 1-2yrs ago, but I feel what GP is listing has become the normalized expectation now.

On founder salaries, the days of ramen garage bootstrapping seem behind us. To be able to even live in these high cost Startup hubs cities/countries, needs higher salaries that is used to in the 90s and early 2000s. I'm not talking about crazy founder salary asks, which I have seen (pre-seed co-founders asking for $130k from their investors!), but even taking a "cut" still puts you in 80-100k range. If folks have families, it's a tough ask to go lower. Founders not cutting their personal finances to the bone, I think is fine, and I think it's a good thing the expectation is mostly gone that you have to somehow prove your commitment to investors or whoever by how broke you can go. It is quite sadistic.

I think the bigger issue is startups being seen as "risk free" and that is totally a problem. Not because we want everyone to fear for their life each day the come to work, or because we want to scare people off from joining. It's because it messes up the incentive structure and misalignes people. Startups need people who have, taken all the info in, are aware of the risks, and dive in head first anyway. Because they are committed to the mission/idea, want to just do something they find cool, or even because they want to roll the dice and strike it rich...whatever the reason. This is not to exclude people with lower risk tolerance, or who _need_ to make higher cash comp to meet their commitments...that's fine, just join later on at a point where the risk meets your tolerance. It just does not work if the latter type of person joins early.

To give a recent example. I was reading through one of those layoff lists that come out of folks who are looking for new roles post a company layoff event. I recognised a name. Turns out it was my former account manager at a very big (and safe) enterprise tech company we buy from. This person had moved to, at the time, a decacorn startup, had been there 7mo and was now out the door. This startup was a rocketship, and no one was really expecting anything to go wrong. But like you said, they are never "risk free", and this macro economic shock hit their trajectory and cuts were made. Unfortunately they hit this person. I don't know if they made the move to a startup with the risks in mind, or if they just saw it as a move to (probably) higher pay and a better "lifestyle".