Reconsider

I&#x27;m so freaking happy that someone finally affirmed my feelings that maybe, just maybe, I don&#x27;t need to start my own startup with the notion of &quot;Unicorn or Bust&quot;. I&#x27;ve just felt wrong since graduating college 3 years ago, unable to motivate myself to hack outside of work, and this finally captures why I&#x27;ve felt so tired. I am tired of feeling like I need a Unicorn idea to justify working on something outside of my job. I want to work for myself, but it just hasn&#x27;t felt possible without a plan to &quot;Take over the world&quot;. I don&#x27;t want to take over the world. I want to build something that people use and can sustain me. That&#x27;s it. But for every idea, there are millions of reasons in the back of my head that stop me from doing it, all boiling down to &quot;Well I just won&#x27;t be able able to grow this as a startup&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t really care about growing something as a startup. I don&#x27;t need to revolutionize anything. I just want to make someone&#x27;s day better through software. I want to launch a cool product that people find fun, silly, useful, critical to their process, whatever you want, and NOT be beholden to interests of anyone who isn&#x27;t involved in the daily operations of whatever product that is.<p>I just want to build something, and make it better every day. Something that I own, that I can change however I want, whenever I want. I shouldn&#x27;t have felt like I needed a16z to invest in my company to believe that my product is worth something.

Another submission for the flagged files.<p>As of 17:51 GMT, this submission is 3 hours old and has 374 points, 68 comments, sitting in position 11 on the HN front page<p>In position 10 is a submission from 8 hours ago with 100 points and 76 comments (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10505476" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10505476</a>)<p>In position 1 is a submission from 4 hours ago with 177 points and 91 comments (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10506338" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10506338</a>)<p><i>edit:</i> This isn&#x27;t to pass judgment on the merits of the article, which seems a bit conveniently timed to a product launch linked at the bottom. But as a community we should realize what gets flagged&#x2F;pushed down and by how much.<p><i>update:</i> at 18:51 GMT, this is 4 hours old, has 490 points, 97 comments, and is in position 26. In position 25 is a 5 hour old submission with 57 points and 15 comments (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10506372" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10506372</a>)<p><i>final update:</i> at 19:24 GMT, this is off the front page at position 33. Age 5 hours, 536 points, 112 comments. In position 18 is a story from 10 hours ago, 362 points, 192 comments (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10505362);" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10505362);</a> the 10506372 story referenced previously is now in position 31, 62 points, 16 comments, 5 hours ago.

People find themselves drawn to the unlikely startup success stories because they have a beautiful allure to them: if I spend every night tucked away writing code and focusing my entire life around my work, then maybe I, too, can be the next Zuckerburg!<p>Even though this narrative is hugely removed from the realities of startup life (most college startups go nowhere, the most successful founders tend to be in their middle age with significant financial stability, etc), it is still romanticized by founders and startup employees and other people who really should know better. So then why do they buy it?<p>To get people to work harder for you. Spending every waking moment in front of a customer or a computer screen eating bulk ramen sounds like a great montage scene in the movie you&#x27;ll have an EP credit in, and this distorted reality is even easier to sell to impressionable young college grads who have maybe .1% of the equity (in options!) that founders and VCs get to keep.<p>Why are jeans and hoodies the fashion choice of founders? Because if everyone is used to dressing like a poor college student, they tend not to notice how little they&#x27;re truly being compensated.<p>This isn&#x27;t some big founder&#x2F;VC conspiracy, it&#x27;s complicit common sense.

I&#x27;m eagerly awaiting the forthcoming geek poet who&#x27;ll write our Howl. Who saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by startups... their skulls bashed open by a sphinx of capital... that moloch &quot;whose mind is pure machinery... whose soul is electricity and banks!&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genius.com&#x2F;Allen-ginsberg-howl-annotated&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genius.com&#x2F;Allen-ginsberg-howl-annotated&#x2F;</a><p>Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

This is brilliant. The one thing it doesn&#x27;t go into is the harm that will be done to healthy ventures when the bubble pops. Suddenly, everyone will have a bad taste and healthy ventures won&#x27;t be able to get sane necessary resources and bridge loans, all thanks to the excesses of what&#x27;s described in the piece. Not engaging in the insane startup culture described isn&#x27;t just a healthy lifestyle choice, it&#x27;s also taking a stand against a situation that will soon very much harm the tech industry as a whole. When the tide rushes away from the unicorn machine, it will carry away the innocent as well.

Most of the time, &quot;disrupt&quot; is a euphemism for &quot;put a Web 2.0 interface on&quot;. You&#x27;re not disrupting shit, you&#x27;re putting whitewash on a shoddily-cobbled-together product that other people have been doing better for decades. It&#x27;s all style and no substance.<p>If you&#x27;re doing something new, you&#x27;ll probably own the industry just by virtue of being there first. But you&#x27;ll also probably not grow to be super-huge, because if you were solving a huge problem, it probably would have been solved already.<p>The exception to this is when the problem <i>is</i> huge, but the technology wasn&#x27;t there to solve it before: see search (Google), social media (Facebook), mobile apps (Uber). And even then the conditions need to be just right (an app for calling cabs would probably not have been nearly as successful if it didn&#x27;t coincide with a legal loophole that allows them to undercut the taxi industry).<p>But most ideas aren&#x27;t those ideas. And that&#x27;s okay. A business that solves a real problem, even if it isn&#x27;t a huge problem, will likely be able to stay alive, profit, and grow just fine. Those &quot;disrupting&quot; companies that are all style and no substance will crash and burn when the tech bubble pops.

I am big fans of 37s. I learnt a lot from reading thier blog posts especially thier unconventional (at that time) thinking to avoid crazy detailed requirement docs, focus on blank error states etc...<p>However, DHH&#x27;s constant railing against the VC backed world seems a little tiresome. There seems to be a religious fervor to his essays that thier way is morally better (e.g. thier business model seems like a honest transaction vs VC backed startups who inflate numbers etc).<p>I think a lot of people get that raising VC is not the only way to build a business (there is even a nice tradeoff statement (do you want to be Rich Vs King).<p>It&#x27;s a choice one makes. It&#x27;s not morally inferior or superior to raise VCs or to bootstrap.

I am in the process of creating a startup business with 2 partners.<p>Our ultimate goal is NOT to get rich, is NOT to be famous, is NOT to be valued billions of rubles.<p>We want to be free, we want to work on the projects that motivate us, we want to make our own decisions and decide when it&#x27;s good to work and when it&#x27;s not.<p>For me this is the most motivating part of this adventure. I can totally relate to this article and it even gives me hope in our way of doing things.

I love this part of the article, it&#x27;s incredibly important to remember this:<p>&quot;The web is the greatest entrepreneurial platform ever invented. Lowest barriers of entry, greatest human reach ever. I love the web. Permission-less, grand reach, diversity of implementation. Don’t believe this imaginary wall of access of money. It isn’t there.&quot;

I think DHH (and a lot of people) miss out on a lot of modestly growing startups that are doing relatively boring things because they don&#x27;t hear about them. It&#x27;s not that they don&#x27;t exist. They just don&#x27;t hear about them because they&#x27;re relatively boring.<p>The vast majority of (moderately successful) startups I see friends and colleagues starting or working for are in this group. For every one friend I see go work for a company like Uber, I see 10 more working for a startup that builds software for expense reports or HR teams or insurance companies or old school cab companies. They will never be billion dollar companies, and they probably won&#x27;t IPO, and they may be an acquisition target -- but that certainly isn&#x27;t their end goal. They are gaining customers and growing relatively sustainably, making smart choices about when to (or not) take outside funding.

The documentary, Hoop Dreams by Steve James and Frederick Marx captures the mania around startups just as well as it does for getting into the NBA. It&#x27;s well worth watching.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hoop_Dreams" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hoop_Dreams</a><p>“Many are called but few are chosen”, Matthew 22:14

I don&#x27;t think early investors dubbed themselves &quot;Angels&quot;. If I recall correctly it came from the term used for similar people who used to finance Broadway shows. I like to think some ingenue in the 1920s called some rich guy &quot;angel&quot; and got him to fund a show and it went from there. I should Google it but I miss speculating on things...

&gt;Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.<p>I think this says more about the state of VC than startups themselves. Founders feel that if they don&#x27;t run around banging pots and pans while tooting their own horn&#x2F;vuvuzela, they won&#x27;t ever get any attention from investors. Crowdsourcing early funding is just going to make this worse.

I really enjoyed reading this.<p>However, I personally feel distain for the perspective of how every engineer should maintain a noble sense of worth. No matter the environmental differences of being in SF or elsewhere, people are bad at engineering wall to wall. While there are still successes at both sides of the coin.<p>Frankly, &#x27;Software eating the world&#x27; has nothing to do with us. It has to do with, well, the world. And my own struggle with the tech industry is how disconnected we are in the &#x27;startup and grow&#x27; sector.

&quot;I wanted a life beyond work. Hobbies, family, and intellectual stimulation and pursuits beyond Hacker News, what the next-next-next JavaScript framework looks like, and how we can optimize our signup funnel.&quot;<p><i>drops the microphone</i><p>What a great article. I am glad someone finally said something.

I find interesting that this article, that got 541 points (at the time I am writing this) is out of the front page already. Makes me wonder if there is the hand of people (VCs) <i>not</i> wanting programmers to aim for lifestyle business behind that.

I think many founders echo his motivations. The one that he implicitly suggests is misaligned is:<p><i>I wanted the best odds I could possible get at attaining the tipping point of financial stability.</i><p>And that this is due to the corruption of investors. So I guess the takeaway is that if you raise money, choose your investors wisely.

I&#x27;m surprised this needed to be said.<p>There are millions of small businesses (in the US) and the vast majority of them are just lifestyle businesses that bring freedom&#x2F;pleasure&#x2F;excitement to the owner with perhaps a possibility of earning more, but there are many that earn less than what they could make at a regular job with their same experience.<p>This whole world domination startup thing seems to be localized to SV really. Nowhere else is this considered normal.<p>By the way, there&#x27;s a lot of confusion with just the term &quot;startup&quot; in general when it should really be reserved for something new (biz model, innovation, etc). If you&#x27;re just doing something that&#x27;s already been proven, which is completely ok, then it&#x27;s just a small business.

<i>But in the end, they’re money lenders.</i>

Greed, lust, and gluttony. Three personality traits our money-focused society selects for.

The reality is you can&#x27;t accomplish anything meaningful in life without being uncertain. It is OK to be unsure. It is OK to do things that are not sexy. It is OK to make small incremental improvements.<p>Unicorns happen over time. Smart founders have patience and resilience to weather many storms ahead.

&quot;Lifestyle companies.&quot;<p>They are everywhere... but we are quieter than high-growth startups. Many of us work for them. We enjoy it. If anyone was not aware of their presence, step outside of the VC-driven culture. There is a whole other world out there.

This post really resonates with me. I think there is a &quot;silent majority&quot; type of situation going on. Most people venturing out do it for the reasons DDH states: independence, the ability to work with people of your choosing, etc.<p>Most of us don&#x27;t care about winning some ridiculous lottery where smarmy Wall Street types stakehorse tech wunderkinds.<p>Things have a way of balancing themselves out.

At the end I pictured David, standing on stage, stared at by the audience. After a brief moment of silence, he drops the microphone. A loud crack echoes through the PA, followed by screeching feedback, before the audio engineer remembers to turn down the volume. Meanwhile David turns around, calmly stepping down the stage to be detained by the (Ge)StartupPolice…

Relevant bit from the latest season of the Startup podcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;qfpdzPnElVU?t=738" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;qfpdzPnElVU?t=738</a> *spoiler alert - this is toward the end of the season, in case you&#x27;d rather listen to the podcast in order

Eloquently expressed pov as we&#x27;ve come to expect from @dhh. Legend. Now what I&#x27;d love to hear is from founders of @stripe and @intercom as they have both lived the experience of developing &#x27;lifestyle&#x27; scale businesses before bringing unicorns to the market

&gt; In the abstract, economic sense, a 30% chance of making $1M is as good as a 3% chance of making $30M is as good as a 0.3% chance at making $300M<p>I see this repeated as a truism all the time by the anti-VC crowd and it sounds great. But is there actually any evidence whatsoever of it?<p>The success rate for startups which have raised a Series A is substantially higher than the success rate for startups and small businesses in general. If it were <i>true</i> that avoiding VC funding somehow gave me a 30% chance of building a $1M business, I&#x27;d be happy to give it a shot (at least for a year or two). But I just don&#x27;t see any evidence of that.<p>If anything, it seems like companies which accept VC money have dramatically better odds of success than other startups. The only reason it seems like VC has a high failure rate is that nobody bothers to write a news article when a random small business fails.<p>EDIT: Downvoters, kindly provide <i>any</i> evidence that avoiding VC funding increases your odds of success by 10x.

Sounds like the plot of silicon valley.

I like this post, but we should contextualize it properly, and look at where it doesn&#x27;t work. Things have developed over the past forty years which don&#x27;t allow the &quot;start small, stay small&quot; to always be a possibility: the increase in winner-take-all markets and the Superstar effect. We see it everywhere when it comes to today&#x27;s job markets, and we also see it (and <i>potentially worry about it being the case, and this is critical</i>) in industries themselves. This latter belief means that if you decide to start something, you may need to consider whether you should bother at all if you aren&#x27;t going to go big.<p>Is Uber in a winner take all market? If so, they have no choice but to operate the way they do: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;4&#x2F;7336433&#x2F;uber-worth-" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;4&#x2F;7336433&#x2F;uber-worth-</a><p>We see it in regular job markets more generally (where we call it job polarization): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;5554" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;5554</a><p>We see it in &quot;art, sports and culture&quot; markets (where we call it the Superstar effect): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;business&#x2F;winners-take-all-but-cant-we-still-dream.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;business&#x2F;winners-take-all-...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;winner-take-all-economics.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;win...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;12&#x2F;26&#x2F;business&#x2F;26excerpt.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;12&#x2F;26&#x2F;business&#x2F;26excerpt.html</a><p>We see it in newspapers:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkprogress.org&#x2F;yglesias&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;198480&#x2F;technology-and-the-top-one-percent&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkprogress.org&#x2F;yglesias&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;198480&#x2F;technolo...</a><p>We see it in attention more generally (which has second order effects, like everyone use just one or a handful of large platforms(!) and where we call it variations of &quot;winning in the Attention Economy&quot;): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_economy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_economy</a><p>So the choice is sometimes (perhaps even often today) not between &quot;get big&quot; or &quot;stay small&#x2F;medium&quot;, but get big (where big may represent firm size, level of knowledge&#x2F;skill, fame, or a number of other attributes depending on the area) or &quot;get (almost) nothing.&quot; When the distribution of customers&#x2F;eyeballs&#x2F;rewards are as lopsided as they are in many areas, the only choice IS &quot;get big or go home.&quot;<p>More:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;business&#x2F;moneybox&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;how_technology_and_winner_take_all_markets_have_made_income_inequality_so_much_worse_.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;business&#x2F;moneybox&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;how_...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;winner-take-all-economics.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;win...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prospect.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;talent-and-winner-take-all-society" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prospect.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;talent-and-winner-take-all-socie...</a><p>I don&#x27;t knock dhh, and this is one of those posts I actually want to agree with, but it doesn&#x27;t neatly comport with extant realities. I think even this advice, just like the advice to &quot;get big&quot; needs to be taken very carefully. All of these roads entail risk (obviously), but the choice of big versus small isn&#x27;t as simple as implied.

That Terry Davis comment :)

What a well-written piece. I agree that there is a lot of room for sustainable, technology based businesses. These are businesses that can optionally be run remotely and don&#x27;t need to limit themselves to the bay area and its insane startup culture. They can work sane hours and be sustainable for their employees. They can provide products of real value. In fact, this is exactly the type of business that I&#x27;m interested in, the only kind with a success profile that&#x27;s not tantamount to the success of playing the lottery, and the only kind where one can hope to stay in control and &quot;be one&#x27;s own boss.&quot;<p>These types of businesses are very much startups, but have a more traditional philosophy and generally plan to stick around for longer than a few years. I&#x27;d say such businesses are often a lot riskier for the owners as they&#x27;re generally risking their own money and time to get it developed rather than someone else&#x27;s money. Spending someone else&#x27;s money is not risky at all. Failure in a silicon valley startup isn&#x27;t a real loss: it&#x27;s expected.<p>The people who venture out on their own and take their own risk with their own capital and time should be applauded for trying to create sustainable businesses that might be beneficial to the wider economy and society rather than creating ones that try to dominate a market for a couple of years and then almost inevitably fade out (as most startups do both before and even after IPO), not really adding much to the economy or society at all, while, of course, screaming the obligatory &quot;I will change the world&quot; mantra. In fact, it&#x27;s this idiotic mantra and the lies one must tell oneself to actually believe it that turns off a lot of great talent form the silicon valley startup version of a business. Most smart people can eventually see through such simple, repeated, dogmatic ideas easily, and don&#x27;t like to be associated with the brainwashed masses for whom these ideas are reality.

Not that I disagree with the main premise, but boy oh boy why waste time skewering terms like &quot;Angel&quot; and &quot;liquidity event&quot;. Sophomoric.

Not reading. Someone summarize?