dopeboy

I've known Ryan for those 10 years, back when we met at Morgan Stanley. He is one of the most persistent and hard working engineers I know.

To people asking why he's giving it away for free: partially because it's content marketing (duh), but mostly because this has been a labor of love for him that he wants to let loose into the world.

Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly strong.

Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.

Volunteered for a non-profit [0], where we taught kids how to code.

0 - https://codenation.org/

Understood and apologies for misunderstanding.

Every single founder I know (and I know a lot of them) doesn't build a business for the specific reason to be acquired. Is it a thought that crosses their mind? Definitely. Is it something investors think about? Absolutely.

But the day-to-day, 12 hour+ grind for them is all about product-market fit and drawing revenue - the things that make a durable business.

AirBnB, Uber, Cloudflare to name some.

Those mid sized companies you refer to did fine for three reasons:

* If they were competing against venture backed companies, they were likely playing in big markets. My bet is they are still alive today.

* They got acquired by the bigger companies and ended up capturing even more short term economic value than they would have otherwise.

* These venture backed companies expanded the market, actually helping smaller players. I would bet money that VRBO's business increased as AirBnB got bigger.

I agree that there's something sleazy about injecting a ton of capital in a niche space; at the very least, it's distorts all the dynamics in it. But you can't deny that this short term chaos creates long term economic value for everyone else.

Uber demonstrated you could add a tech layer to the taxi business and make it more efficient for riders + introduce a whole new set of people to the driver business. Did this harm existing taxi drivers? Unquestionably.

I know it's hard to look at that business model as innovation but it is because now there's extreme price pressure on these companies (esp Lyft) to remove the costliest part of the equation - the driver. So as a result, you have a ton of very motivated energy towards solving that, via autonomous driving.

It took mediocre business innovation[0] (uber) to drive meaningful tech innovation (autonomous driving).

[0] - Purposely differentiating the tech innovation (which Uber deserves a lot of credit for) vs the biz innovation (which last I read is getting better, though still shaky).

A lot of big businesses don't start off as sustainable ones. So they buy time, through venture capital, to become sustainable ones. This kind of news hurts the chances of that category of companies from being created.

Temporarily-not-an-unicorn companies will need to raise more money to become a unicorn. If those investors don't see light at the end of the tunnel, these companies get squeezed.

It's a worrying trend, especially for those of us in startup land. With the Figma deal following through and less companies going public, the assembly line funding model is showing some serious cracks.

Hope it's just temporary.

Not OP but probably a waste of effort for an early stage startup.

We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.”

This is an extreme position. More likely, we are seeing repricing occur. There are still worthy, venture backable ideas. Probably less of them than in the past.

Leaning venture backed.

Good points - social communities have less of an autopilot component than b2b SaaS.

Well now I have to ask - what was it like inside the cauldron? Any learnings you took into your next step?

Typo - a year

Hi Don - I don't know you but I feel like I do now. And your son as well. Thank you for sharing that tweet.

I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders.

One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.

You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.

That's right - OnDeck was spending $500k/month on it.

I believe the closest counter is a breakup fee. Not a perfect solve, though.

Speaks to the power of youtube as well. A generational innovation.

Bit of a strange take. There’s multiple economists expressing puzzlement around the resilience of consumer spending. Don’t think the NYT is expressing an opinion one way or the other here. (FD - I blocked NYT in 2016 and haven’t looked back, but for other reasons).

Appreciate the response. Wife and I looked at SoFlo, specifically Miami, really closely. Even lived for a month. It was hard for us to pull the trigger, but cool to see it's working out for others.

I wouldn't mind being there as opposed to this winter in the bay...

Which part of FL?

Weather, taxes, and CoL.

Damn, I just discovered it 4 days ago. It is excellent, with zero cruft. Looks like I'll need to use Apple Podcasts.

Definitely disappointing. Only hope is they IPO.

Does the solution lie in genuinely investing in a CUDA alternative?

Well said. It sounds like NVIDIA went through the hard work of listening and building for years (decades!). I can imagine some top level execs looking at that success and looking to replicate the tech, studying the use cases that customers want.

Which to be clear, is a viable economic market. It's just that the uptake is painfully slow.

They'll still take meetings - it's free information so they'll never turn that down. Even if they're a solid 'no' from the outset.

VCs aren't always transparent with their reasoning. Some of them said they don't believe in our category anymore. Some of them said "great work, show more growth". It's always difficult to parse the signal here.

It sucks, but you can't be too hard on yourself. Many of these investors haven't deployed capital in months.

A very high proportion of them, but really, every founder is struggling right now.