LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders

https://www.larp.website/

by BerislavLopac • 10 days ago

323 79 10 days ago

larp.website

anotherhue• 10 days ago

I was able to close my first series A after just a few hours of using this. I wish the rate limits were higher though.

dontfeedthemac• 10 days ago

you’re literally scamming VCs lol

peesem2• 9 days ago

oh no!

deadbabe2• 10 days ago

What people miss from these things is that there is economic value being created.

For example, if you gift someone a $100 Amazon gift card, but they also gift you a $100 Amazon gift card. Has any gift actually been exchanged? Yes, the sentiment of giving.

Or if someone pays you $100 to eat a pile of shit, and then you use the same $100 to pay them to eat a pile of shit, you both have eaten, but the money is in the same place it started.

In the end, if you paint a big enough picture, all money flow in an economy is circular anyway.

apsurd• 10 days ago

The moving of money across time is 100% central to money's value. Passing digital money around to cook the books is moving money... fraudulently. So yeah, they're not the same unless you're goaling on the semantic purity of the word "move".

weego• 10 days ago

I'm confused how circulating legal tender between 2 parties could be cooking books or fraud. Each party can absolutely claim they made money from the transaction. The fact they lost money in a different transaction is a separate concern.

antonvs• 10 days ago

Neither of your examples shows “economic value being created”.

deadbabe2• 10 days ago

The state change is the value.

SkipperCat• 10 days ago

But they did increase the GDP by $200.

didntknowyou2• 9 days ago

well the point is value is not being created. the stock market is at an ATH, by all metrics productibity has increased, but ask anyone on the ground- the mood is not as optimisitic as the financial instruments say

Animats• 10 days ago

It worked for NVidia.

kylecazar• 10 days ago

The creator of this has a good note on how the Nvidia situation relates, under his diagram of their circular deal:

"To be clear: every deal here is legal, publicly announced, and defended by the people in it — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called the structure "nothing inappropriate in principle." Critics compare the pattern to 1990s dot-com vendor financing and warn it can inflate the appearance of demand. As Bloomberg puts it, a circular deal is legally different from a fraudulent "round-trip" — regulators' term for sham trades with no economic substance designed to inflate results. LARP is a joke about the round-trip. This is the legal cousin it rhymes with."

browski• 10 days ago

Nvidia makes real things, grinds to push computing forward and are coincidentally wrapped up in the latest hype cycle in a big way

Software-only startups make nothing but hype and (these days) merely copy-paste existing frameworks and libraries into an AWS account, fill in predefined config parameters, generate zero net new knowledge

Studied applied physics and EE in college, been in high tech eng for almost 3 decades and lived through the evolution of software truth still being discovery into streamlined template filling.

People need jobs in this political system so whatever but I know a lot about engineering across contexts and where the bleeding edge is and know SaaS startups are rarely engaged in pushing the edge out further. It's a jobs program to validate political memes

mjfisher• 10 days ago

It says something about the state of the world that I was genuinely uncertain whether this was actually a joke right until the last paragraph.

Very well done.

gardnr• 10 days ago

I too was nervous until I clicked through and had a read.

abalashov• 10 days ago

Okay, that's genuinely funny. Sadly, it might be a little subtle for the folks who need to feel the mockery most.

nylonstrung• 10 days ago

If you go through the most recent YC batches, it's insane how much of their "customer list" is just other companies in the same or recent batches

meric_• 10 days ago

It's the YC playbook. I guess it works, Corgi for example a "AI" insurance company with like only 5 real engineers and a bunch of growth people. Their main customer is other startups mostly YC. Same with Delve.

reticulates4• 10 days ago

Corgi is even worse than just circular revenue, their entire insurance business is a house of cards: https://reticulating.substack.com/p/ycombinators-corgi-insur...

alpineman2• 10 days ago

Yeah, they raise a massive round on traction from other YC companies then need to find the real Product Market Fit (enterprise and others) after that round. It's actually very inefficient

RobRivera• 10 days ago

The flywheel!

dominotw• 10 days ago

yc circular funding scam

bluegatty3• 9 days ago

This is an unfair characterization.

Cohorts are not 'raising massive rounds' on selling to a couple of poor YC startups that 'don't want they product but pay for it anyhow' <- the implication there is very wrong.

They're selling to people who are using their product, but probably have bit of an open mind about things, and are willing to overlook hiccups. A bit like how buyers often have a 'national preference' in some cases.

Every startup ecosystem should do this, it's probably one of the top things any system could do to try to get things going.

JimsonYang• 10 days ago

One of Micheal and Dalton video does address this

Even if you larp revenue, when you get acquired or go public auditors will figure stuff out. Or worse you go to prison. Its like cheating in college-youre just hurtung yourself and others

danpalmer2• 10 days ago

Having been in a YC company that wasn't in the SaaS space, this never made sense to me/us. So many YC products were just way out of a reasonable price bracket, there's only so many $30/m subscriptions you can buy per employee. Talking with their sales teams was funny because they grossly over estimated our budgets.

UnfitFootprint• 9 days ago

Not that I’ve ever partaken in any US startup, but $30/m? If the employees are earning average YC salary that seems like a drop in the ocean, even with 5-6 subscriptions

bluegatty3• 9 days ago

There's nothing wrong with that, it's probably a net positive.

Small companies buying and selling each other's services is probably the #1 thing that other ecosystems should emulate.

Getting your first 3 customer is hard, you need an open and empathetic system for that - a 'cohort' is exactly that.

opem• 10 days ago

I was genuienly confused till the pricing and tipping section.

ant6n2• 10 days ago

What I wonder is what LARP stands for. something like “looped/linked annual revenue platform”? (Don’t answer with something about role playing, it’s definitely not that)

esafak• 10 days ago

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LARP

47thpresident• 9 days ago

It is definitely the life-action role playing definition. As in you’re LARPing a successful company with high cash flow. I know it has nothing to do with actual role playing, it’s just the popular way of calling someone a poser on the internet at the moment.

ant6n2• 9 days ago

It also turns the joke into a single-entendre, which is no fun at all.

peesem2• 9 days ago

it does still stand for Live Action Role Plating, but the meaning of the acronym on the internet has been expanded over the past few months to mean anything like "pretending" or "lying".

0xnyn• 10 days ago

YC be like: hold my beer

jagged-chisel• 10 days ago

… the fake version and the "strategic partnership" version are separated mostly by vibes, scale, and whether a bank structured it.

I have a new business idea …

slj• 10 days ago

I just valued my buddy at 1.2 Trillion

moomoo11• 10 days ago

lets all help each other out become billionaires now /s

desktopentree• 10 days ago

I had serious concerns as an accountant until I realized how familiar everything sounded.

jfil• 9 days ago

I took quite a few accounting courses in University. For every topic we covered, our business school ensured that we wrapped up by examining a case of fraud involving that mechanism. I am grateful that now I know what not to do, and that professional accountants are well versed in all the lates types of fraud so that they can stay away from it.

mcmcmc• 10 days ago

Third post in three day, not counting the ones that have been removed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869910

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852458

The joke is getting tired.

brazukadev2• 10 days ago

it is the same link so you are complaining about a HN system failure which should have upvoted the first submission.

chaboud• 10 days ago

Clicks on link. Reads this thinking it's gotta be a joke... continues reading not sure if it's a joke. Relieved to find out it's a joke.

I guess that's the joke.

Heavies have been playing this "pretend internet money" game off and on for decades. In investment analysis, details matter.

DiscourseFan2• 10 days ago

Yeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!

danny_codes• 9 days ago

The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.

Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.

So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).

DiscourseFan2• 9 days ago

Yeah I know. Them's the breaks, right?

How big of a chance do you think those books will be about a gentle and kind but supremely powerful entity guiding the world? Of course it would be best if the book only appears to be based on that premise, and while the entity is quite powerful, it is being supported by a cabal of individuals who claim they are merely its caretakers but actually derive extraordinary social power by controlling it, and it is revealed that in other lands there are other such entities, and what appeared to be an general peace is actually an illusion created by this powerful group of people using their entity, that they are engaged in near constant warfare, directly or indirectly, with other entities; but, even they believe so deeply that what they are doing is right that they think they are only the entity's caretakers, and that there are only wars because other people want to use their entity for personal gain!

Who knows, your friend might be very clever.

rarisma• 10 days ago

Its a simple spell but quite unbreakable

sherlock-holmes• 10 days ago

i was gonna crash out before i read this and realized that it's a joke lol

Before LARP, growth was constrained by whether customers actually paid us. That's no longer a bottleneck we think about

atleastoptimal• 10 days ago

Do people actually believe that the revenue for these companies is "fake"? Do they think financial analysts don't have anything but revenue to look at to determine the substance of their growth?

KasianFranks• 10 days ago

I'll bite. Can you send us 1% back?

virajk_31• 10 days ago

A sent 10K to B, B sent 10K to A, where is 10K coming from? and if it's a circle then how would you report higher revenue..

juliangmp• 10 days ago

That's the neat part: the money doesn't have to exist at all.

And once you go through enough hops and convince the world that this thing which your company happens to be pioneering will forever change the world and everyone will use it the money circle isn't even relevant because the entire goal was to make your stock prices skyrocket and now you're valued at ridiculous levels!

Just make sure to get out of it all before any Investor actually wants to see real profit being made.

jonah• 9 days ago

You get more money in, so you have higher revenue. Your spending also increases by an equal amount, so your profit is unchanged.

bryanrasmussen• 10 days ago

This reminds me a lot of good old Bonneville Pacific Corps model for getting rich, which worked for years and did make them rich until they tried to merge with one of those naturally suspicious and rule following German firms

https://www.utb.uscourts.gov/sites/utb/files/case_opinion/38...

artemonster• 10 days ago

Call us/ we won't pick up

love the humor

mkw5053• 9 days ago

What is this style/design called? I keep seeing it pop up more and more (and have to assume it's a side effect of vibe coding).

georgel• 9 days ago

Claude Design outputs like this.

stronglikedan• 9 days ago

I don't know, but I find it to be one of the most legible color schemes since Solarized light mode, so I'd be happy if everyone used it.

bluegatty3• 9 days ago

Nvidia / OAI etc. are selling each other product which have a fair market value.

They're not moving money around with 'no services rendered'.

It does however mean that the situation is 'highly leveraged' - and therefor risk is more concentrated, and, they do disclose.

Nominally there's nothing wrong with investing in one's own supply chain.

It makes a lot of sense for a value chain player with huge cash position and therefore a lot of power to take a % ownership of a buyer.

Consider for a moment - what if Nvida acquired OpenAI? They would be two divisions in the same company. Would anyone consider it wrong for surpluses from one to be invested in the other? No. The moment it's 'managerial accounting' instead of 'balance sheet accounting' - nobody would care.

Imagine Google or AWS acquired Nvidia - maybe in 2017 so it would seem more realistic in terms of price - would any of this seem financially dubious? No.

Of course - those mega mergers would be bad for competition, but that's a separate question.

There's nothing inherently wrong going on here, as long as it's on the books and people understand the inherent structural risk of coupling etc..

didntknowyou2• 9 days ago

i thought it was a prank website but then realise this was real

zackmorris• 9 days ago

It's interesting that this is a parody, but that no real-world alternatives exist. Some come close, ranked from lowest to highest gatekeeping:

- https://www.gofundme.com/ (personal / charitable)

- https://www.patreon.com/ (ongoing creator subscriptions)

- https://www.indiegogo.com/ (creative / tech / flexible rewards)

- https://www.kickstarter.com/ (creative / rewards)

- https://experiment.com/ (scientific research)

- https://gamefound.com/ (tabletop games)

- https://www.crowdsupply.com/ (hardware / tech)

- https://www.kiva.org/ (micro-loans / social impact)

- https://wefunder.com/ (startup equity)

- https://www.startengine.com/ (startup equity)

- https://republic.com/ (startup equity)

- https://www.prosper.com/ (loan consolidation)

Note how some like kickstarter.com and prosper.com should have been at the top, but sold out or lost their way to cater more to funders than entrepreneurs.

The same problem happened with freelancing, where developers are force to apply to low-paying gigs so many times that it's perhaps no longer lucrative:

- https://gun.io/ (premium developer-first matchmaking)

- https://www.codeable.io/ (niche / premium wordpress development)

- https://lemon.io/ (vetted startup matching)

- https://www.toptal.com/ (premium / 3% elite tech network)

- https://arc.dev/ (remote technical role matchmaking)

- https://weworkremotely.com/ (high-quality remote tech job board)

- https://www.turing.com/ (ai-driven technical matchmaking)

- https://contra.com/ (commission-free portfolio network)

- https://www.upwork.com/ (open marketplace formed from elance & odesk)

- https://www.fiverr.com/ (productized gigs / digital storefront model)

- https://www.freelancer.com/ (open bidding marketplace)

- https://www.guru.com/ (legacy bidding marketplace )

I feel that both of these trends have combined to create the k-shaped economy of haves and have-nots that we have today.

Imagine if a team of internet lottery winners formed an investment alliance (perhaps using AI) to compete directly with venture capital firms like Y Combinator, outside of the schmoozing and board micromanagement that come with having to network.

I know I'm not supposed to say that, but that's why the startup ecosystem is so uninspired today vs its peak from 1995-1999, before the 2000 Dot Bomb which returned us to gatekeeping by the wealthy and powerful.

In the early years, the academic/conceptually-correct solution tended to be the right one. Whereas today, winner-take-all effects and survivorship bias dominate, so that capital (unearned income) grows exponentially while wages (earned income) flatline or regress.

Which results in high underemployment rates when workers tread water having to choose between saving 10% of their income to start a business or make rent. I'm having trouble finding statistics for it, but it tends to be about double the unemployment rate, hovering around 10-20%:

https://www.newgeography.com/content/004016-underemployment-...

Some demographics (like recent college graduates) are approaching 50% underemployment:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

In other words, as many as half of the best and brightest minds in the US are trapped in dead-end or (multiple) part-time jobs, if they're lucky enough to have a job.

Which seems odd at a time when there are so many trillions of dollars of investment capital with nowhere to go that they pump up the stock market's biggest companies instead of investing in the millions of people struggling to afford the endlessly increasing cost of living.

LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders

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