Why "Start-ups" Will Destroy Us

http://petovera.com/professional-web-design-blog/2011/03/why-%E2%80%9Cstartups%E2%80%9D-will-destroy-us/

by PetoVera_Matt • 15 years ago

16 22 15 years ago

petovera.com

pg2• 15 years ago

Local bakery = shrub; IBM = redwood; startup = redwood seedling.

hsmyers• 15 years ago

Not quite: startup = cheatgrass: see http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/natres/06310.html

PetoVera_Matt8• 15 years ago

Potentially, yes, but I do NOT believe this definition could be applied universally.

panarky• 15 years ago

The author's point is that both IBM and the local bakery are built to last, patiently building value over time.

Startups are too often get-rich-quick schemes whose founders want to work hard for 3 years, then cash out and spend the rest of their time on 'speeches and beaches'.

pg2• 15 years ago

IBM wasn't "built to last." It was a rollup of a bunch of cash register companies, handed to Watson to run by the financier who bought them.

The truth is that in reality there's usually less planning than there later seems to have been. Things that turn out big were often small and tentative initially.

PetoVera_Matt8• 15 years ago

This was exactly the point I was trying to convey :)

"Speeches and beaches" -- my man, such a desire is a wholly lazy and narcissistic dream.

cellucci• 15 years ago

There are certainly startups hoping to become redwoods, but there seem to be many with goals or target markets that would likely limit them to shrubs at best. Of course, there is also a large class of "startups" that are a lot more like Christmas tree farm seedlings.

PetoVera_Matt8• 15 years ago

In an ideal world, this is true.

However, pay attention to what the ingredients of that seed are.

That is why there are "startups" (the type I described in the article) and then there are Startups.

gte910h• 15 years ago

The author of the article paints with too broad of a brush something not everyone shares.

Lots of people would love to turn their companies into large going concerns.

PetoVera_Matt8• 15 years ago

I agree (I am one of them), but there are also lots of people who get into business and start a company for the exact opposite reason: cash out as big and as fast as possible.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

Honestly this kind of drivel needs to be kicked out of hn. Start-ups create value and what companies do with these start-ups once they have been acquired is their own problem. Big companies a constantly screwing up left and right, but that is not our fault.

Yes we lust for new things, which is why the author can afford a computer to write his article on; yes we lust for profit, that is why joining a start-up and taking up the huge risk is something one is willing to do; yes we make old businesses obsolete, but that just frees people to join other companies which are capable of creating stuff, not sucking up resources.

The only thing start-ups forces people to do is to think and adapt. And if they aren't willing to do so, they have nobody but them-self to complain about.

And no start-up can create a bubble, those bubbles come from the insane recklessness of the FEDs dollar printing and the resulting super low interest rates because there is too few productive places to invest ones money.

We need more start-ups, not fewer; We need more economic activity, not less and we need more people with ability, not clones who will never amount to anything.

johnrob• 15 years ago

I think we over estimate the impact startups have on job creation. The recent home runs (google, facebook, zynga, groupon) have created astonishingly large value with relatively few employees - a few thousand on average. Startups are good at creating wealth, but not necessarily jobs (we still have record level unemployment in silicon valley). Our country needs to put millions of people to work; the 20k jobs created by startups are not going to solve that problem.

Theoretically, the unemployed workers can adapt to the "new economy" and re-establish themselves. Empirically, however, that's not happening.

Startups are more likely to aid the jobless via welfare (from tax revenue) than by actually employing people.

gsmaverick• 15 years ago

New startups don't just create jobs for the people they themselves hire. Google & Facebook in particular have created far more jobs than those on their payrolls.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

It is possible for a writer now to make a good living selling his self-published ebooks on Amazon's kindle platform, to maintain a living writing blogposts for an audience larger than many smaller magazines ever had, etc.

But that is beside the point: job creation isn't the goal of any business nor is it the responsibility of any business to hire a certain amount of people, and the country as such doesn't need to put a large number of people to work - people are responsible for their own life and if they are not willing to do that (and you may very well be right about that I don't know), that is their own problem.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I was thinking of the parallel "article":

The guy who wrote the "article" and I use it in quotes because it means different things to different people, actual journalists spend time and effort crafting a story and thinking about the various sides, where as this sort of "article" is spit out partially considered with an expected lifetime of minutes, never to provide another insight later on ...

More experienced folks seem to grasp that business creation is good. They also understand that businesses start and then evolve in response to market forces. And lets not forget that businesses are the expression of the people who it employs.

PetoVera_Matt8• 15 years ago

Hi Tom, I think most people (me included) would agree with your last sentence)

Question for you though: which do you think creates more wealth for the most people:

Short-term greed or long term greed?

tomjen34• 15 years ago

I don't think there is a difference really: short term greed which has little negative effect on the future is merely good long term greed (since a dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow) whereas eating the seed for the next harvest isn't really greed, but insanity.

I am not advocating a blind greed simply to get as much as possible damn the consequences but a rational greed based on the understanding that it is better to have than it is to not have.

Mz• 15 years ago

It seems to me that part of what he is complaining about is that startups are basically designed with scaling in mind. In other words, he is bitching about the fact that there are now 6 billion or so people on the planet, so if some service of a particular sort does well, good god, it needs to be fed like a growing baby whale on steroids -- something a couple of guys in a garage probably can't pull off by themselves without some of infrastructure you see in the form of YC, venture capital, et al.

PS: Really hideous website, offensively so given the title (or whatever it is) "The Difference between good and great web design".

PPS: Sentence #2, which starts with the word "this", I think you mean "think". Think hard about that for a minute.

Why "Start-ups" Will Destroy Us

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