I wouldn't hold my breath on this unfortunately, I'm more hoping on things happening on the cash-burning thing side.
So they still got something for the money they paid, otherwise they wouldn't have paid.
If people were donating money to for-profit companies, then you'd have a point in your argument, but that isn't reality as far as I know.
I believe that making everyone an owner of the platform could help to fix this (basically stakeholder capitalism, using well-designed programmable equity structures), and now is a great time to try it.
But I gone a step further. Things won't really change within my lifespan so... I just took to a more pessimistic, and less empathetic outlook. I'll flip back to optimism at some point.
This is just yet another adverse externality that is not priced in - that market does not seem to be able to do it, so regulators will eventually force these things to be priced in.
The new tax laws on research and development is a way to encourage long term sustainable businesses.
It's exploiting the economic system as it exists (which is short-sightedly destroying the planet and causing untold miseries along the way), but from a personal perspective, it's obviously the best option to cash in ASAP and live a happy and varied life away from technology.
Time will tell - Rich people also need to navigate decaying landscapes.
It is more a tragedy of the commons situation - Everybody else are f*king up the common, so you have to too.
The only exceptions are open source products with a healthy community, where I can evaluate their possibility of survival after vendor shutdown, or commodity services, where I can count that I could replace them with something similar with a minimal effort.
Stick to what your customers want!
I agree with the general sentiment but not everyone is there thinking about multi-milion exit strategies, not everyone is buddy with people in SV or YC to even dream of that. Some people really want to solve a problem and make a living out of it, sometimes that's due to the idea, sometimes to the "customers" and sometimes something else.
But yeah, it's sad that nothing can be taken for granted, even if you pay through your nose. Greetings to Broadcom...
Either you focus on creating a great product that customers love. As a consequence, you'll hopefully make some money.
Or you focus on making a truckload of money as quick as possible, and building a product is merely a means to an end.
As OP said, there's far too few companies choosing the first approach, and far too many choosing the second one.
It's quite possible that the expected value for most companies over, say 10 years, is overall higher. I obviously have no data, call it a hunch
We just don't hear enough about companies growing steadily and profitably over the years, but over report on the unicorns and smash hits.
I don't think we can use their behavior as an indicator of what's optimal over the long run.
Even those who follow the former path often opine about lost youth and time with friends and family.
I have and will always be an advocate of human connections. My experience of working across a number of agencies and startups has been the best focus on that (though it can be hard to sustain).
I would love to work with people and at places that understand and realise the value of this.
Also, very early in my career, I got burned on a project by building on what IBM at the time touted as their next future platform for the SME space, only to see it discontinued the next year. Glad I payed my learning cost this early on a relatively small project.
Either that, or the startup just ceases to exist - after a M&A has taken place.
Is it possible the project has few employees and little revenue precisely because they don’t want a massive exit? Or is it possible they declined his request not because they’re chasing growth-at-all-costs and instead because they thought of this random LinkedIn message as simply another distraction from a developer who (statistically for random reach outs) might have wasted their time long term? Even if you fund it, it still might not be worth it for the developers, might be a distraction for their roadmap, might be a low value feature, random-LinkedIn-man may withdraw funding in the future or be a nightmare to work with… seems like there are more possible reasons he got a no than just “they’re obsessed with an exit.”
I’m open to being wrong here, but I see a guy who is mad that a startup declined his feature request.
For this particular instance, this company, who knows what the story is.
smidgeon•3h ago