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My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

(mtlynch.io)
1071 points mtlynch | 8 comments | 16 Feb 24 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 1.091s | source | bottom
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marklubi ◴[16 Feb 24 15:37 UTC] No.39398429[source]▶
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.
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BadHumans[dead post] ◴[16 Feb 24 15:42 UTC] No.39398477[source]▶
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abfan1127 ◴[16 Feb 24 15:44 UTC] No.39398507[source]▶
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.
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1. spencerflem ◴[16 Feb 24 15:46 UTC] No.39398529[source]▶
Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are
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2. WrongAssumption ◴[16 Feb 24 15:56 UTC] No.39398662[source]▶
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.
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3. zilti ◴[16 Feb 24 16:47 UTC] No.39399511[source]▶
Apple, Google, Amazon are every bit as bad, and Microsoft is still up there, too.
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4. uoaei ◴[16 Feb 24 17:11 UTC] No.39399867[source]▶
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?"
5. jrockway ◴[16 Feb 24 17:18 UTC] No.39399962[source]▶
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.

6. WrongAssumption ◴[16 Feb 24 17:34 UTC] No.39400197{3}[source]▶
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?
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7. bbor ◴[17 Feb 24 03:37 UTC] No.39406114[source]▶
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
8. zilti ◴[17 Feb 24 08:20 UTC] No.39407523{4}[source]▶
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?