My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

So good to see some actual Startup News on here. I miss the old days of this site when things were more optimistic and less click-bait.

in what sense is it getting worse? While there may be local minima, I'd argue that its the best its ever been. News has always been pessimistic because negative emotions are easier to trigger to drive attention which pays the bills.

Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are

Is it clear? Microsoft of old? IBM of old? AT&T of old? Juggernauts with abusive monopoly power that tech companies today could only dream of.

I think it’s more that the startup ecosystem has matured considerably since ~2007. Starting a company back then was still kind of a counter cultural thing, now it’s a common career path.

Apple, Google, Amazon are every bit as bad, and Microsoft is still up there, too.

A lot of things are getting superficially better (personal computing tech has never been more incredible), but there's a lot scary shit that is encroaching on the daily without sufficient plans in place to really deal with. Off the top of my head:

- Global warming and how we don't seem to have any plans to a path to hit any of the less-than-apocalyptic warming targets, - Corporate regulatory capture, with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily, - The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago, - This one is a combination of all three of the others (and a lot more), I suppose, but capitalism eating itself and taking a lot of really helpless-feeling people with it.

A lot of things do keep improving, but a) a lot of people never get to see or benefit from those improvements, maybe more than you think, and b) there are these terrible monsters on the horizon and nobody with the power to do anything about it seems to be willing to actually do so. It shouldn't take a whole lot of empathy to project yourself into the shoes of someone for whom shit is the worst it's ever been, nor a lot of creative thinking to realize that there's a whole lot of those people out there.

At almost any other point of time you could have made a similar list with the relevant issues of the time. The news cycle today is so much more accessible, and is skewed towards pessimism, so your view of the world will also skew that way depending how much news you consume. Trying to condense the world state into "getting better" vs "getting worse" is not a useful exercise, its anyone's guess. The world is definitely changing though, and many people don't like that.

We've already passed the 1.5 Degree Celsius limit on global warming. That alone has catastrophic consequences.

Yet, the production of fossil fuels remains near record levels, and producers are aiming to scale up, as opposed to scale down. Political discourse on this topic often amounts to "but my expenses are already too high."

For many people, this is still an abstract and slow moving problem. Yet, it is a very real problem with dire consequences. (That are somehow easy to ignore!)

Is the world getting worse?

In some ways, it's getting better.

Yet, we seem doomed to cause so much destruction. It's gonna be bad. Very bad. But not right away (for many of us).

https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/0...

I'm getting visions of that New Yorker cartoon about shareholder value but it's just a techie in Allbirds saying "is it really worse, tho?"

Would you agree that whatever you are currently working on, either at Nodewood or evisort, is contributing to this superficial betterment of the world? Not to be dense but you are talking about empathy for people who are at the bottom of the human totem pole while posting on a tech forum while working on products that most likely don't contribute anything to actually making the world a better place. If you really cared, you would give up almost everything to give up what you have to go help those in need...but I guess a post on HN will do as well.

Yeah, I mean, these companies are at the end of their "startup" lifecycle and are now just ordinary big companies that exist to chill and produce dividends. When you hear "Amazon", think "IBM". When you hear "Apple", think "Coca Cola". When you hear "Google", think "Goldman Sachs". All of those companies make an enormous amount of money but haven't done anything interesting in 50 years.

There will be new startups that eclipse all of these companies in interestingness. The one for the next 20 years is probably OpenAI.

Isn't that sad though? An entire industry that in your own words doesn't "contribute anything to actually making the world a better place"

I think people realize this more than they used to which explains so much of the tech pessimism

Friend, you're not going to get anywhere in life by being a disciple of Whataboutism, I promise you that.

Assuming that’s true, is that counter to my statement? Mine was in response to someone saying it’s clear tech companies are getting worse, and your response to mine is they are just as bad? So also in your mind not clear they are getting worse, correct?

It is sad, I work in it as well, I ask myself "wtf am I doing" every single day. But the security of having and providing a warm/safe home for my family, being able to have fun experiences, etc...is too much to give up. I can definitely say I am selfish.

You are not my friend, so let's not pretend. My response had nothing about whataboutism, and I am skeptical that you even know what that means based on your reply. I am directly saying that you are speaking from a high moral chair, while likely not actually doing anything to help the world. Its okay, I do the same thing, the difference between you and me is that I am not pretending to be Gandhi.

Oh here is a definition of whataboutism: "the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation or raising a different issue".

I am assuming you won't be able to figure it out though.

I think you two agree more than it seems.

You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse in general.

While I agree that global warming is a serious issue without a clear future, it seems a little far fetched to attribute that as a factor in the deterioration of hackernews community's cultural standards.

The OP is categorically wrong about some of their assessments:

"with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily"

Poverty around the world is being reduced on a massive scale. There are undeniable issues with wealth gaps, but the world population is still benefiting greatly from the imbalanced amount of downstream wealth coming to it.

"The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago"

The world has been dominated by these ideas for the majority of its existence. Several of the world powers still operate within these ideas, not to mention many of the third world countries, the power just moves from regime to regime. Acting like authoritarianism is "new" because the OP just got an inkling of it in their own country is pretty dense.

TLDR op just plucked a few news headlines that get re-iterated and made that their world view.

Just enjoy your time here, plant a tree if that would make you happier. Don’t dig your self into an hole and loose sight of brighter things. / a parent

We've been over-polluting with CO2 for over a 100 years[1]. I prefer to focus on how now we're slowly gaining the will and the way to address that.

- Solar and wind power

- New Nuclear options

- Grid Storage

- Electric vehicles

It would be nice if we'd done a hard left turn on the economy and somehow never got here but that was probably never realistic.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2889/

Yeah the site has morphed over time to more tech news/articles that Hackers comment on (with some level of what feels like promotion) than strictly news about Hackers/startups.

Before I visited HN today I read the whole blog post. I was notified by an email from mtlynch in my inbox. I draw a lot of inspiration from the consistency he has in writing the monthly and yearly retrospectives. Keep up the great work!

I guess it depends on your PoV. For example, for iraqis the world is much better now than it was in 2009 or 2007, at the peak of "tech optimism" when they were getting bombed into oblivion. And vice versa

Friend,

A) poverty can be reduced while inequality increases. And inequality is definitely increasing. And the assessment that inequality isn’t that big of a deal and that we should focus only on poverty is very from a “categorical” assertion, imo.

B) “the world isn’t getting worse because bad things have existed in the past” isn’t a very clear argument. I think the BBC says it best: “Nationalism has always been a feature across Europe's political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006

Yeah this seems like the important factor to me. The whole industry is doing layoffs, at least partially in an explicit attempt to combat the insane amount of privilege that we techies have cultivated since the .com boom. Hacker News is bound to get a little more vicious when people are being fired and told that it’s because someone else took their job

> The world is actively getting worse so it makes sense the news is actively getting pessimistic.

This is Hacker News. Not news-news. HN does not have to, and should not, look or feel like a news site.

Just as bad, and then some. The big ones used to only have B2B power with vendor lock-in. The new ones have much more. They have power over their individual users, too, by locking in their data and controlling the communication and sharing with others, and trough that even over people who are not their customers yet. You want to communicate/share with person X? Looks like you have to have an account at Y for that, too bad, eh?

Classic scaling problems.

Most people aren’t entrepreneurs, most people are risk-averse, cynical big company worker drones.

The worker drones have way more time to spend on hacker news, since any job at a big company is infinitely easier than being an entrepreneur.

Hence why the comments on every Show HN post for the last 7+ years is dominated by low stakes nitpicks. The type of things you hear in big meetings at big companies. “I would rephrase this on the landing page.”

Exactly. I started my SaaS almost a decade ago, with stints of in-between consulting to finance the whole thing.

For the first half of the decade, I used to drink the cool-aid too: rewriting components using the framework-of-the-day, stating my opinion on whatever I considered to be important on HN, Reddit... Resulting in a lot of stuff, but not in reasonable ARR.

A few years ago, after making lots of cliche mistakes, I had another rough period, resulting in me buying out my partner's half that I gave to him for free without any contingencies, and having to consult again to finance the buy-out.

After that I decided to take the leap for the third time, and took a deep dive myself into sales and GTM, resulting in what I consider a ramen profitable ARR right now for someone with a family of four with a working spouse (little over 100K€ ARR).

I'm now slowly and steadily growing, but reinvesting almost everything I make back into it.

My next big learning step will be figuring out at least one repeatable way to get new clients.

I'm still in dubio whether I should do proper marketing, or just hire 2 SDRs and hand them a list with contacts...

I am very picky on my customers, so they tend to be very sticky, and buy extra modules as they renew their licenses, so I'm quite happy with how everything is evolving...

However, the whole thing takes time, a lot of time, and it requires a lot of grit and patience. So while it might sound interesting in a short comment on HN, it's basically just grinding every day, throwing things up to a wall, and seeing what sticks... If I'd blog about this every week, it would probably be really boring.

It might take 2, 3, 5 or 10 years to get to € 1M ARR, or maybe I'll never get to this amount, but I'm ok with that. I have friends who got investors, sold or were acqui-hired, and to me they seemed not to be happier at all during the job. And while it's nice to get FU money, I'm not sure that I'm willing to exchange years of my life for it, as i'm currently mostly enjoying myself and building the kind of company that I would love to work for.

The reason I'm no longer posting on Reddit, HN and the likes, is that - all things considered - I already have too much things on my plate, and posting on social media is not the best use of my time.

I do keep skimming articles to get the big picture as a hobby, but skip most of the shiny new things (TM), and stopped contributing because the value-add for me is so low.

Highly relevant comic for me: https://xkcd.com/386/

I imagine there are many others that share a similar story.