[HN Gopher] Startups are an act of desperation
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Startups are an act of desperation
Author : justinzollars
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-11-23 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.eladgil.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.eladgil.com)
| scarface74 wrote:
| Statistically, the last reason you should join a startup is to
| get rich. Most fail and even those that "succeed" most only do so
| for the VCs.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Statistically there is almost no chance of becoming a
| professional athlete, but it is much easier to measure if
| someone should go down that road because athleticism is easy to
| measure.
|
| How do you measure if you are good at ideation, coding,
| architecture, and the myriad other skills required to run a
| startup? Unless you are implying that a startups success has
| little to do with the founders.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Yeah, startup bros typically plan on exploiting the fuck out of
| a few naive coders to get rich quick. That's why all the real
| startups have programmers as central figures, they can actually
| produce and stopped themselves from getting scammed.
|
| If you're reading this and thinking about working for an early
| startup, don't. Best case, you make some douchey boss a few
| million dollars and worst case you lose years of your life
| making vaporware. Find a real job with stability.
| greatpostman wrote:
| I keep getting "offers" of 10% equity to literally program
| the whole product that doesn't even exist yet. Startup bros
| want 90% to send emails. The crazy thing is people do take
| those offers.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| The only programmers taking these offers are at the bottom
| of the barrel in either skill or self-confidence, I'm
| afraid.
| eladgil wrote:
| I agree that most startups fail. Only a small handful of
| companies at a given moment are the "breakouts" that are
| clearly working, and those are the most derisked to join
| (although not risk free for certain).
|
| I think the entire industry forgot about startup risk during
| COVID, and unfortunately it is coming rushing back now with the
| changing environment....
| scarface74 wrote:
| Which startups are "clearly working" if you define "clearly
| working" as "making a sustainable profit".
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think so because desperation refers to lack of hope
| (literally; check out the eymology). If you have no hope, why
| would you embark on a startup. Startups are an expression of
| hope.
| senko wrote:
| > Of course, through the lens of expected value, these numbers
| look worse as traditionally there has been a high failure rate to
| startups.
|
| "worse" here does a lot of heavy lifting here and doesn't begin
| to convey the magnitude of "worse"
|
| Use YC companies as an example. Acceptance rate around 2%,
| success rate about 10%. This gives you 0.2% success rate for a
| typical startup applying to YC.
|
| If you do succeed, unless you bootstrapped, you're going to get
| diluted. Let's handwave this to keeping 75% of your company (a
| generous assumption!).
|
| This gives the expected value of $30k, for 2 to 5 years of hard
| work. Before taxes.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You're twisting those numbers quite a bit. Anyone can apply to
| YC, like half are an idea. I'd wager most of the rejected are
| not following through with 2-5 years of hard work on it. You're
| also acting like a reject from YC means 0 EV, even when many
| successful startups have like 3 applications to YC, if they
| even were accepted at all. That $30k EV number is useless and
| not in any way the actual EV of 2-5 years hard work on a
| startup.
| nequo wrote:
| By success, do you mean making it big or staying in business?
|
| If the latter, do you think that the 98% who are rejected by YC
| all go defunct? I don't know the numbers and I'm curious.
| exac wrote:
| The set of companies that are rejected from YC can also succeed
| or fail.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I am not sure desperation is the right word here. He used it to
| list out a bunch of unrelated motivations, but most of them I
| wouldn't consider desperate.
| eladgil wrote:
| I definitely agree motivations for starting a company are
| mixed, and vary a lot from person to person. For the most
| successful companies I have seen, the motivations have largely
| collapsed to the ones I listed - with different mix of
| motivation by founder.
|
| Finding the right word was definitely a struggle, but I think
| you need to lack alternatives in order to start a company. So
| "desperation" seemed to fit.
|
| Open to other ideas/suggestions on a better word?
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(page generated 2022-11-23 23:01 UTC)