Forget moonshots, investors want profit now

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Not in my world and I live in the EU! People raise millions and 10s of millions here for stuff that is nonsense and cannot be done. As someone said already here: openai wrappers that do something intended in &lt;5% of cases but the millions will solve that by insert-some-shite-fine-tuning-rag-bla.<p>And when at meet-ups people actually tell me that investors will pay whatever for an ai wrapper demo (I saw a few last month that were not even that; just faked) and a few $ charts.

That article claims way too much from too little data.<p>Tesla does have a serious problem with pricing. Electric vehicles have become cheaper, and nobody can mark up electrics the way they did a year or two ago. Tesla had to cut prices. But not enough. BYD now sells more electric cars than Tesla. BYD now has a good US$20,000 electric car, and they&#x27;re selling it in Europe, Mexico, South America, and of course China. Not in the US only because of import restrictions. Tesla&#x27;s factory in Shanghai is way behind schedule and work seems to have stopped before much was built.[1] The Hertz&#x2F;Tesla debacle has been embarrassing.<p>Tesla is an auto company, and has the operating problems of an auto company - competition, parts and service, and reliability. Tesla is way overvalued for an auto company. And no, the &quot;autonomy&quot; thing won&#x27;t save Tesla. Everybody has Level 2 now, and the driving assist systems from Mercedes and Ford (Level 3) are considered better than Tesla&#x27;s. Waymo, of course, has level 4 and taxicabs running around.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IqQ0uuazqbk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IqQ0uuazqbk</a>

Instead of replacing &quot;moonshots&quot; with &quot;show me the money&quot;, I think we should try &quot;roofshots&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160715152958&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rework.withgoogle.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-roofshot-manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160715152958&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rework.wi...</a>

now that the borrow rate has gone up and dollar has strengthed. they arent competing against 0% inflation so less need to go into risky plays. in some ways this helps the economy because it allows people to focus on what really matters but in other ways a bunch of people who were employed because of low interest rates about about to lose their jobs. Plus makes month to month operations more expensive with the higher cost of borrowing for companies (which most do now)

A better title would be &quot;Forget Moonshots. Investors Want Profits That Will Actually Exist&quot;

To profit, you need to have a working business plan.<p>You can&#x27;t have an Underpants Gnomes plan:<p>Step 1: Steal underpants<p>Step 2: ?<p>Step 3: Profit!<p>Here Step 1 is building an app or website for most startups. What is step 2? You skipped it. Step 1 is the Moonshot, Step 2 is how you profit from the Moonshot.

As proven by all the AI wrapper startups raising enormous seed rounds

The market indeed seems to put rather little value on growth these days.<p>Example: Google. Their p&#x2F;e ratio of 30 seems low if you assume that they will keep growing like they did for the last ten years. Which was about 19% annually.<p>At a p&#x2F;e of 30, to outperform a ten-year bond at current rates, they would have to only grow at about 3% or so from now on.

I mean “investors” in the WSJ sense always want either profit now, even if it tanks the company in the long term, or BS hype wagon to drive the stock up, again regardless of the long term impact.<p>The WSJ acts as though the only portion of the economy that matters is the profit produced by rent seeking investment firms and hedge funds.