[HN Gopher] American tech giants are making life tough for start...
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American tech giants are making life tough for startups (2018)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 129 points
Date : 2022-06-02 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| How have conditions changed at all in the past 4 years?
| honkler wrote:
| and these "startups" are making life tough for small businesses
| (mom and pop stores). No sympathy from me.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah, just thinking about all the artisanal home grown mom and
| pop run email autocompleting companies that EasyEmail was
| putting out of business gives me the heebie-jeebies.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Mailchimp was a little like that, as it was started in 2001,
| between tech bubbles, and was mostly a side project for
| years.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/10/08/the-
| new-a...
| mourinhoalex wrote:
| Big companies also make it hard for mom and pop stores? In the
| end competition is tough and when there are new players old
| ones suffer.
| honkler wrote:
| point is that it doesn't matter which one of them wins. Both
| screw over working class people.
| spideymans wrote:
| How? Are you talking about real estate prices?
| honkler wrote:
| I'm thinking of so called "disruption" associated with
| startups. Whose lifestyle is actually disrupted? The have-
| nots.
| frozenport wrote:
| >> buy young firms that might challenge them
|
| This is not the worst outcome for a startup
| actionablefiber wrote:
| It might be a nice payday for the founders but it's terrible
| for the business environment. It's basically a bribe to stop
| operating in that sector. Sure, it beats out Microsoft churning
| out the Teams to your Slack/Loop to your Notion, then rolling
| it into 365 and eating your enterprise market share alive
| without so much as a consolation prize, but as a user any time
| a great product hits the market, no matter how much I like it I
| have to worry if I can trust the company to be around for the
| long haul and stick to their offering.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > what if in addition to privacy policy and terms documents,
| each online property has an acquisition term
|
| > It might be a nice payday for the founders but it's
| terrible for the business environment.
|
| At the founding stage we tend to choose from highly quantised
| "types" of company, usually from a boilerplate legal
| template; limited liability, independent trading company,
| partnership, charity, non-profit and suchlike. I am no expert
| in company law, but as far as I know, at least in the UK,
| "Articles of Incorporation" (the charter of the company) can
| be almost _anything_ that 's legal.
|
| Hence I've long been of the opinion that founders should
| build-in "non-acquisition" clauses, making it impossible for
| predators to simply scoop up a promising company, perhaps for
| some fixed period like 10 or 20 years. That would solve some
| of the issues under discussion here. It would also change the
| ecology and motivations within which companies are created,
| grown and invested in.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Hence I've long been of the opinion that founders should
| build-in "non-acquisition" clauses, making it impossible
| for predators to simply scoop up a promising company
|
| This sounds good and all, and I would be tempted to do it,
| but a non-acquisition clause does not prevent the big
| companies from cloning you either.
| al_borland wrote:
| >as a user any time a great product hits the market, no
| matter how much I like it I have to worry if I can trust the
| company to be around for the long haul and stick to their
| offering.
|
| I still get upset about what Google did to Sparrow. I'm
| extremely gun shy when trying things these days. I don't want
| to like new products or get used to their features, because I
| don't trust they will be along for the long-haul.
|
| This can be an issue even without acquisitions, as companies
| can simply go out of business. With the current business
| model of "take on debt until acquired or SPAC", it doesn't
| give me much confidence in the long-term prospects of many
| new tech companies. The first thing I always look for is how
| they are making money. If they don't have an answer to that
| question, I generally stay away.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The entire "business" of startups is to get acquired. Few
| expect to go public.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I think we might more accurately say; the entire "business"
| of some _investors_ is to get companies acquired. That 's
| not the same motive as seen from inside the startup. And
| indeed, it's only _some_ investors. I believe there are
| plenty who are in it for the long game, or are far more
| strategic in terms of ROI.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Once the startup takes investor funding, it's irrelevant
| what those inside the startup want.
|
| That being said, we all go to work to exchange labor for
| money. It's naive for employees to see working for any
| for profit company as anything more than just a financial
| transaction.
|
| Investors know that the chances of a startup to go public
| and then be profitable enough to have long term stock
| gains is infinitesimally small.
|
| Can you name one startup that has been really successful
| - ie throwing off crazy profits and margins since
| Facebook?
|
| Investors aren't interested in "lifestyle businesses".
| jdsully wrote:
| > Once the startup takes investor funding, it's
| irrelevant what those inside the startup want.
|
| It really depends on the ownership structure, and that
| will depend on leverage at the time of fundraising. YC
| companies are unlikely to give up control until Series B
| (but like all things your mileage may vary).
| itsgrimetime wrote:
| Yeah but is it good for competition?
| outside1234 wrote:
| No but it is not exactly tough for the startup :)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| But a bad outcome for the economy overall. In the medical
| industry this is extreme. The startup scene is basically a
| feeder pipeline for the big guys. Nobody even tries to start a
| self sustaining business.
| louniks wrote:
| I wonder if this can be viewed as (yet another?) example of
| companies externalizing the negatives. Pollution is the
| classic example, both during manufacture and at the end of
| the lifecycle. In this case, it would be financial risk.
| Founders bootstrap a start-up, either with their own money or
| outside investors, and these folks carry all the risk. The
| established players can safely wait until the startup either
| fails or succeeds, and buy into a sure thing in the latter
| case.
| mateo411 wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. An acquisition is a risky thing
| for a company to do as well. It's never a sure thing and
| correctly pricing the acquisition or predicting if the
| company will be successful with the acquisition is also not
| guaranteed or easy.
| nijave wrote:
| For some highly regulated industries, it's hard to bring
| small products to market. In banking, there are tiered
| regulations based on your size (in the U.S.) so there's
| more overhead for large companies
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think it is simply a consequence of technology enabling
| instant global communications and decreasing marginal costs
| precipitously giving bigger players an enormous advantage.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| We made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah I didn't get what that meant in the Godfather movie, but
| I got it when I read the book (which is amazing, so so good,
| not as good as the movie but still).
|
| It's not an offer if it can't be refused, it's just theft.
| mateo411 wrote:
| > it's just theft.
|
| and extortion.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yes, both.
| jthacker wrote:
| I'm unable to read the article due to the paywall, but if the
| first paragraph is indicative of the thesis, then it is "startups
| that build incremental functionality on top of existing products
| are upset when the company improves their product with the same
| functionality". I'd say there are two issues at play here: 1. The
| large Tech companies are too big and do too many things. They
| should be broken up for no other reason than to protect the
| public from their eventual collapse or abuse of power. 2. As a
| startup, don't build an incremental product that can easily be
| scooped by a competitor, especially if that competitor is a mega
| corporation.
| zeruch wrote:
| "s a startup, don't build an incremental product that can
| easily be scooped by a competitor" unless that's the goal (and
| sometimes it is).
| ren_engineer wrote:
| the amount of data Google and Facebook have isn't talked about
| enough in this context, they most likely have internal tools that
| allow them to project which startups are becoming successful and
| either copy them early or just acquire them before the startup
| itself realizes how much potential they have
|
| Instagram acquisition for 1 billion as an example was a steal in
| hindsight, I bet facebook had more accurate forecasts for their
| growth than Instagram itself. I know Facebook did get some bad PR
| for collecting user data via a VPN app, but they didn't face any
| legal consequences- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
|
| This doesn't even address how at a societal level these companies
| can basically create self-fulfilling prophecies by manipulating
| what stories and information is shown to people
|
| also makes me wonder about AWS/Amazon and what their policy is
| around copying some of their customers. They obviously fork or
| outright deploy managed open source projects to compete with
| them. I know Walmart doesn't let any of their suppliers use AWS
| either.
| jethkl wrote:
| In prior life, I worked at place where we had access to data
| that contained user searches. We could plainly see that google
| searches, due to autocomplete, "quantize" results in a way that
| bing and others don't. The result is that google searches are
| almost inorganic crafted things, and they contain unusual
| artifacts. The impact on society is definitely real.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The impact on society is definitely real.
|
| What impact do you mean and how do you know?
| jethkl wrote:
| For "what" -- I don't specify. Regarding "how I know", I
| start with several premises:
|
| 1) search engines are the dominant way to find information
| now.
|
| 2) conservatively, >=80% of searches in US are through
| google.
|
| 3) google is not a passive observer of user search queries,
| but instead actively suggests queries to users.
|
| It follows that there must be some impact. The "engagement"
| effect is this: I start a search for Depeche Mode, but get
| distracted by suggestions for J Depp. In contrast, DDG
| suggests Depakote, Depression, Dept of Revenue and a few
| other things. Other search engines seem to be less
| aggressive.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > For "what" -- I don't specify.
|
| Yeah, that's why I'm asking...
| jethkl wrote:
| There is hint of "what" at end of my previous comment,
| but no larger assertion is made.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I wasn't asking for a hint, I was asking what you meant.
| tristor wrote:
| I've actually been wondering about this for years. Nearly every
| startup I've worked at used Google Apps and put all their
| strategy documents and trade secrets into platforms owned and
| operated by Google. I'm sure there's something that assuages
| this concern in the contracts, just as I'm equally sure there's
| some clause that completely invalidates that and lets Google do
| whatever they want. I wonder if they actually do mine their
| data to identify startups for acquisition / competition, they
| certainly are incentivized to do so.
| skohan wrote:
| This is something I wonder about Amazon/Google/Microsoft
| specifically: since they're hosting basically every startup,
| how much are they able to leverage that data to their own
| benefit? AWS alone must have quite a detailed insight into
| which products and services are gaining traction just based on
| traffic data, or even how much they're billing customers.
|
| To what extent are they able to leverage that?
| ozzythecat wrote:
| 10+ year Amazon veteran.
|
| AWS has very strict rules around accessing any kind of
| customer data. All of Amazon has some pretty significant red
| tape and hurdles to get security clearance to launch any
| piece of working software. No, that won't stop a shitty
| product manager from looking over sales data to figure out if
| a certain business is worth exploiting, but accessing AWS
| customer data is an entirely different ball game. It's like:
| jumping over a fence vs trying to break into Area 51.
|
| I can almost guarantee that this egregious level of snooping
| on AWS customer data would never happen, and if somehow it
| did happen, it's a nefarious individual with SIGNIFICANT
| authority to influence entire teams to extract, analyze, and
| get insights from this data. Again, I don't think anyone at
| Amazons leadership is that insane to put their entire
| professional career in jeopardy, for something that someone
| would have a 100% guaranteed leak.
|
| The people working there aren't exactly idiots who'd easily
| fall in line and do something like this.
|
| I'd like to be clear - I'm not defending Amazon. I no longer
| work there, and for what it's worth, I think it's a miserable
| place to work. A culture of back stabbing, inventing
| abstractions to drive promotions, people literally crying,
| disconnected leaders focused more on empire building to get
| promotions instead of doing what's actually right for
| customers. Even then, the notion that AWS could line up
| teams, even on a secret project to do something so disdainful
| is an extreme stretch.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| you wouldn't need customer data, you can just look at basic
| infrastructure stats or even how much they are spending on
| AWS over time and estimate a startups growth and revenue.
| AWS rolls out clones of various developer tool startups all
| the time
| skohan wrote:
| But I don't mean they would have to access customer data.
| If, for instance, they just took a look at how much they
| were billing certain clients for bandwidth over time, they
| could already use that as a reasonable growth metric. Do
| you know for a fact that they don't do that?
|
| I know for instance they do something similar in terms of
| ripping off successful products on Amazon.com as Amazon
| Basics.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Amazon has been caught copying customer products to sell as
| their own before [1], and AWS has been accused more than
| once of doing the same [2].
|
| It's a pattern of behavior from Amazon, and given their
| backstabbing, cut throat culture (that you mentioned) isn't
| it fair to say that it's possible for Amazon employees
| looking to get ahead at all costs would violate those
| strict rules?
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/amazon-i...
|
| [2] https://archive.ph/M7hLF
| guelo wrote:
| It could be that Amazon treats AWS differently than their
| retail business. Any AWS data stealing scandal could
| easily drive away multi-million dollar contracts. But
| they've gone through many retail scandals without
| seemingly affecting anything.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You're talking about something completely different. This
| wasn't AWS having access to customer workloads. I am
| current employee at AWS. The amount of alarm bells that
| would go off, audits and complicity by line level
| employees to make this feasible and it not come out is
| astronomical.
| azemetre wrote:
| I feel like words are very cheap, unless there's literal
| government regulation and making it a felony, it's all
| meaningless.
|
| What government regulations actually prevent this?
| __derek__ wrote:
| The incentives aren't really there. There's a lot more money
| in selling infrastructure than in (poorly) copying some B2C
| application.
| skohan wrote:
| What about for deciding which SAAS application to emulate
| as a first-party service?
| __derek__ wrote:
| That's fair, but I think it's also the case there:
| Salesforce, Twilio, and Snowflake are much better as
| customers than as competitors.
| throwaway_1928 wrote:
| Given that Amazon is known for knocking off physical brands
| belonging to its 'retail partners' in its online store and
| then undercutting and outranking the originals [1], why would
| they not do the same with software hosted on AWS?
|
| A lot of AWS itself is just copied open source projects [2].
|
| Google does the same thing with Yelp [3].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/amazon-i...
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-
| clo...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-
| google-eu...
| jedberg wrote:
| My friend worked in ops at Google, and they had super strict
| rules about accessing customer data (basically you never
| could) and strict monitoring around access. Even if someone
| gave you permission you still couldn't do it. You couldn't
| even access your own data with the internal tools.
|
| I had a similar experience with AWS when I worked at Netflix.
| We were trying to diagnose a really strange problem and I
| asked the engineer to look at our data from their tools to
| help me find it. They told me they couldn't access that data,
| that the tools blocked them. Then I tried to give them an SSH
| key for one of our instances and they told me they would get
| fired for doing that and could not under any circumstance log
| into our box.
|
| I assume MS has similar controls.
| skohan wrote:
| But what I mean is you wouldn't even need to look at
| customer data. Just knowing how much traffic is going to
| which services would tell you a lot about a business. I
| don't know if they somehow obfuscate that as well.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Sure, the average employee doesn't have access to this
| information. But do you seriously believe there isn't a way
| for the inner circle (VPs and above) to do this kind of
| data mining covertly?
|
| Sheryl Sandberg was using her power to silence reporting on
| her partner's sexual harrasment charges. Ebay execs were
| terrorizing a random couple. But no, they would never look
| into customer data! Pinky promise!
|
| Such a naive way of thinking...
| jjav wrote:
| > Sure, the average employee doesn't have access to this
| information.
|
| Exactly. There will be strict controls for nearly all
| employees, but the rules don't really apply to top
| executives. Anyone in IT or Infosec who has to try to
| enforce policies on top execs has encountered this in
| their career.
|
| If there is a substantial business advantage in seeing
| some data the company has, you can bet the execs are
| seeing that data.
| [deleted]
| ABeeSea wrote:
| Facebook bought a VPN company specifically to monitor traffic
| to competitors.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
|
| Amazon bought Alexa (the site ranking site, not the voice
| assistant) for the same reason.
| rhizome wrote:
| And for which FB is currently fighting a class action
| lawsuit:
|
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532210053469687808.html
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/nX06E
| peppertree wrote:
| Big tech gives employees RSUs. There's little risk for employees
| and huge upside. Startups offer options, which employees have to
| buy with their own cash, and deal with tax implications. Average
| engineer can only get burned so many times before realizing
| startups are crap deals.
| mourinhoalex wrote:
| Agreed, startups give you sort of a lottery rush, you imagine
| how much money you can make and you can accept just out of the
| thrill of you having so much money.
|
| More often the stock options are worthless, and that's how many
| companies value them when counter offering.
| pacetherace wrote:
| Startups are not a crap deal. Startups that start with the
| dream of raising 100s of millions are crap deals.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Title should be "greedy investors and management making life
| tough for themselves". Where did i put my tiniest violin in the
| world...
| dzink wrote:
| There are several stacked catch 22s here.
|
| 1. Often the giants don't pursue a space until a startup proves
| it's viable - in that case you have to start something to make it
| happen. 2. Even internally there is a lot of competition at the
| giants for prime real estate and promo space on the apps to
| feature existing or new internal projects. The more types of
| projects the business launches, the more it has to kill because
| the mobile screen won't grow any bigger. So there is a limit on
| how many acquired companies will actually keep living. If the
| team is any good, they are also pulled in other directions. For
| every github and instagram there are many more dead ends and even
| more so acquisitions of data.
|
| It makes you wonder: what if in addition to privacy policy and
| terms documents, each online property has an acquisition terms
| statement. That would state for users and future acquirers see
| what is up for grabs if the startup is ever acquired (would
| product keep operating as part of the deal, would data be erased,
| would software be open sourced, would users/employees get some
| kind of a distribution, etc.)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > All the while, Martino's ultimate warning--that they might
| someday regret actually getting the money they wanted--would
| still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system
| designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what
| you want to build--the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing--
| almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of
| technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built
| cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these
| startups represent "the field offices of a large distributed
| workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate
| institutions," doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five
| corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment
| isn't the discovery that you're unlikely to become a
| billionaire; it's the realization that your feeling of autonomy
| is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set
| up to fail by design.
|
| > They ran an experiment. None of their lives have been
| ruined." He knew they'd get good jobs, even if it meant the
| life of a project manager at Yahoo. "And none of their
| investors' lives have been ruined either. When they close up
| shop, their investors will say, 'That's one more off the books.
| I don't need to help them anymore. I get my time back.'"
|
| _No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush_ by Gideon
| Lewis-Kraus
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
| salawat wrote:
| Holy shit.
|
| That about crystalizes my sense of existential ennui at the
| moment.
|
| On the one hand... It works. On the other hand, Christ, if
| that's all it boils down to... Dear God, what have we built?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's funny because _No Exit_ , and that article which is
| the abridged version of it, was published eight years ago.
| The industry has been in this steady-state for a while
| until COVID hyperinflation upended everything.
|
| https://slate.com/business/2014/05/no-exit-by-gideon-
| lewis-k...
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| In terms of acquisition statements, music labels I read do 5
| year contracts, with all contracts renegotiated upon
| acquisition. Says it all, that's why YC says don't do a music
| startup. Just don't.
| alexashka wrote:
| When was it ever easy to do something new that threatens the
| existing power structure? Oh right, never :)
| WalterGR wrote:
| If anyone is curious, the submission from 2018 got 455 points and
| 164 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221885
| systemvoltage wrote:
| There is an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, you simply cannot
| build advanced semiconductors without thousands of people in
| scale. We wouldn't have cheap semiconductors if it wasn't for big
| corporations. On the other hand, the moat that they build in the
| process through various ways (market capture, lock-ins, IP
| threats, etc) are real obstacles for startups. Startups are the
| seeds that clear out old forests and rejuvinate the land. They're
| necessary but so are the forces that are their obstacles.
| Conversation here is generally sawtoothing between these two
| opposing forces but may be there is a role here for some minor
| form of regulation. A type of an economic free zone for startups
| where they're immune from large corporate pressures. America
| could benefit from a Shenzhen/Goungzhou type of a economic free
| zone.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Startups, once sufficiently successful, also simply
| metamorphose into the the big corporations they displaced,
| witness FANG. (And even Apple itself, once built to challenge
| IBM's dominance.) Seems like this is all something inherent to
| the nature of power, regardless of the domain.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yeah, although inherent to nature would necessitate some kind
| of a proper death. Without it, these ancient goliaths linger
| around with no sense and no purpose (HP, IBM, etc).
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Not for nothing, but these "American tech giants" offer _huge_
| credit programs for startups to use their platforms for free to
| launch.
|
| AWS offers $100k for a year if you've raised some funds, and I
| saw that Azure is offering $150k pre-funding (I don't know if or
| what the time limit is on the Azure credits). I'm sure GCP offers
| something similar, though I don't know the details.
|
| These are _huge_ , and a smart startup could quite easily
| leverage these to skip an entire funding round (with some amount
| of luck). I'm not sure if you can daisy-chain these offers, but
| if you can, a quarter of a million dollars saved on engineering
| infrastructure cost is pretty much the polar opposite of "making
| life tough for startups".
|
| You might note use the full amount of credits, but if you've
| found a product/market fit (and if you haven't after the first
| year, that may be it's own sign), and you've not been
| particularly cautious about your code's efficiency, $100k is a
| godsend, at least insofar as you not having to actually fork over
| cash for your missteps in the first year.
|
| I don't know if those programs were offered when this article is
| written, but they're offered now so the title is no longer true.
| degrews wrote:
| I'm skeptical. I feel like any startup for whom 100k is "huge"
| is not at a stage where they'd be spending anywhere near that
| amount on cloud infrastructure.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Voluntary actions from big corporations don't cut the mustard.
| They can cancel it any time, for any reason and without
| warning. It's nice of them but that's not why they're in the
| business of giving away credits.
| tpmx wrote:
| These offers only seem to be there for VC-funded companies, as
| you say.
|
| Recent experience with GCP: Self-funded, organically grown
| company. Europe. AWS spend and revenue growing with like 25%
| per year for 8+ years. GCP only offers 30% off the first year
| as a migration bonus. That's it. Meh.
| ssalazar wrote:
| This can cut both ways. Even after the recent massive dip, Snap's
| valuation is an order of magnitude greater than Facebook's
| notorious buyout offer. Twitter's Fleets feature lasted less than
| a year, and Im not sure that their Clubhouse-"inspired" feature
| has gained much traction. Its not clear that even Facebook will
| be able to disrupt Tiktok's momentum. Slack exists and is
| successful despite consolidated offerings from the tech giants
| (Google famously has a double-digit number of chat apps).
|
| Generally, startups have drastically less internal momentum,
| bureaucracy, tech debt, or politics to contend with and are much
| better positioned to push fresh ideas, and be responsive to
| customer needs rather than fitting a larger corporate narrative.
| But its fair to say that if a startup idea is really just a
| feature idea (even a really good, well-executed feature idea,
| like Calendly) and doesn't scale its ambition beyond that, the
| best outcome to hope for is a buyout, and at worst being built
| internally by a giant.
|
| On the other hand, its never been easier to start a software
| business thanks to incentives from the tech giants. Google Cloud
| is basically free to start up and gain traction with. Granted,
| there may be downsides to this, but not having to think too hard
| about infra opens up a lot of opportunities at the same time.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical that Apple opening
| up iOS to sideloading will lead to Meta, Google, or Amazon
| rival third party iOS app stores hosting apps with more
| invasive tracking and lack of privacy protections.
|
| These tech giants are great at xeroxing products and features,
| not so good at selling them in such a way that users can be
| convinced to switch. The existence of so many cookie-cutter
| clones that never get anywhere, from entire cloud gaming
| platforms, to mobile payment methods, to slapping Snapchat-
| style stories into an app for no reason, shows that it's easy
| to envision and build, hard to get actual users.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Slack was bought out by Salesforce.
| brightball wrote:
| I'm currently using Google's chat and spaces at work. It's
| passable. They have a "threaded" view that I was really excited
| about at first but you can't collapse the threads so people
| just reply to whatever the first thread is that they see.
|
| If they could get the UI right on the threaded bits and add a
| standalone desktop app, they'd be very close to "good enough"
| for most places that need some central chat option.
|
| I haven't tried out their web hooks yet, but it's on my
| experiment list. The rest of the Google Workspace offering just
| makes life so much easier though.
| __derek__ wrote:
| > Im not sure that their Clubhouse-"inspired" feature has
| gained much traction
|
| I have no idea what the numbers look like, but I'm aware of
| people using Twitter Spaces (even though I no longer use
| Twitter!), while I'm not aware of _anyone_ using Clubhouse.
| mulligan wrote:
| > Even after the recent massive dip, Snap's valuation is an
| order of magnitude greater than Facebook's notorious buyout
| offer
|
| you need to do the math for both companies. If Snap took the
| offer and held the FB stock, it would be at the exact same
| valuation that SNAP is currently at
| Ferrotin wrote:
| But that's not what you do with the stock.
| mulligan wrote:
| hmm, please explain. is the ceo of snap still holding SNAP
| shares? it is liquid and the ability to sell off or keep is
| true whether he had FB shares or SNAP shares
| ssalazar wrote:
| Fair point. Even with the valuations exactly the same, Snap's
| case demonstrates resilience to "American tech giants making
| life tough for statups."
| [deleted]
| aylmao wrote:
| To be fair, calling Snap, TikTok or Slack a startup is pushing
| the definition of a "start-up" a bit. This article _was_
| written in 2018 when these were all smaller, but even back then
| these weren't too small.
|
| Snapchat has been around since 2011, Slack has been around
| since 2013, and Musical.ly has been around since 2014. By 2018
| they all had significant user bases; Musical.ly had been in
| acquisition talks with Facebook in 2016 [1], and was acquired
| for $1 billion by ByteDance in 2017 [5]. Snapchat had famously
| been offered $3 billion in 2013 by Facebook [2]. Slack was big
| enough to buy HipChat and Stride from Atlassian [3][4].
|
| By 2018, I'd say these companies were already in a good
| position to compete with tech giants; but I wonder about the
| smaller startups. Say companies that have been founded in the
| past 5 years; have they had an unfairly hard time? Do they see
| any future where they can actually compete with a tech giant,
| and not just shoot for a buy-out? I don't have data on this,
| but I'd be curious to know how the trends have been shifting
| here.
|
| [1]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/11/13/facebook-
| musical...
|
| [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-has-
| used...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stride_(software)
|
| [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Stripe's session had something unsettling in their
| presentation. They boasted about how well they're good at
| dealing with bureaucracy and byzantine laws in fintech so we,
| as their customers, don't need to worry about them. In a way,
| they're admitting that the moat is built by the bureaucrat
| class and they're the beneficiaries of being inside the
| perimeter. They deserve it but we should sometimes take two
| steps back and confer to ourselves - "Wait...why have we built
| a giant moat in the first place?". Large corporations have
| perverse incentives to increase the moat by working with the
| only coercive entity we have - the Government.
|
| Future has in for us more state corporatism than I'd like. It
| is sort of dystopian, but that word has been diluted these
| days.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| In the absence of government, those same large private
| entities would simply build similar bureaucracies in their
| stead, and we would have even less recourse against them.
| Vote with your dollar or vote with your vote, the dilemma
| exists in both real and imagined societies.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Moats should be built through technological advancement,
| not appeasing regulations. I think you misread, I am not
| advocating absence of the government. But we should
| question decades of regulation that has piled up in a way
| that provides giant moats that do not do anything to build
| a better product (no strike for Stripe, speaking generally)
| but to satiate those regulations and prevent others from
| building anything.
| ssalazar wrote:
| In the specific case of Stripe, Ill gladly take a larger
| bureaucratic moat in exchange for PCI compliance. The
| cryptocurrency world is rediscovering this tradeoff all over
| again.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| Slack was acquired by Salesforce
| curuinor wrote:
| Slack's gotten bought. It's bought. SFDC bought it. come on...
| ssalazar wrote:
| That doesnt materially change anything I said. They made it
| to IPO without getting swallowed or beat by a tech giant,
| they won.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yeah, honestly I think the bigger negative impact on startups
| is the incredible profitability of these targeted advertising
| monopolies that has pushed market salaries so high that upper
| quartile programmers with 3-10 years experience inherently see
| their value as being $500k-$1M in total comp without any real
| notion of what kind of business structures can generate the
| kind of cash flow to justify those salaries beyond just burning
| VC capital in an oversaturated bull market.
|
| Even though I personally have benefitted from the upward
| pressure to software engineering comp, as consumers I believe
| we would have a way better ecosystem of tech products if
| engineers salaries weren't tied to VC economics.
| ditonal wrote:
| But engineer compensation has been larger pushed up by the
| FAANG companies which are highly profitable. There's some VC
| fueled companies competing with them like Uber but on the
| whole engineer compensation went up not due to VC money but
| because big tech was able to generate millions in profits
| from engineers. Every FAANG company has a P/E ratio under 30
| so these big engineer packages are from strong business
| fundamentals and profits, not VC economics.
|
| Startups have the ability to compete in ways like better
| equity deals but by and large they still highly prioritize
| their investor concerns over hiring concerns as reflected in
| things like liquidation preferences in ISO and stingy equity
| grants. Most of the founders would rather ride their startup
| to the grave then re-evaluate the "standard" terms of their
| equity compensation approaches which each year have become
| more favorable for VCs and less favorable for employees.
|
| Even though big tech has many problems and things I disagree
| with, at the end of the day they respect engineers by paying
| them their value while startup founders prefer to make
| engineers second class citizens then bemoan their hiring
| difficulties.
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _But engineer compensation has been larger pushed up by
| the FAANG companies which are highly profitable._
|
| If you go back and re-read this is exactly my point.
| Google, Facebook, Amazon have structural advantages that
| make them more profitable than the majority of useful
| services ever could be, much of which is based on the
| unregulated and morally questionable use of massive amounts
| of user behavior data. This sucks the oxygen out of the
| room for startups who could provide an honest product for
| an honest price, but might not be able to get the economies
| of scale to pay $500k per senior engineer. In other skilled
| labor professions $100k-$200k is considered well
| compensated, and that creates a larger sweet spot which
| enabled more diversity of services. With software +
| internet the potential for near-zero-marginal-cost global
| scaling push everything towards a winner-take all
| mentality, and so small shops providing diverse and higher
| quality niche products get squeezed for talent.
|
| Again, I have benefitted personally from this dynamic, but
| I'm also old enough to be saddened at the unfulfilled
| promise of lower software build and distribution costs that
| we envisioned at the blossoming of the web and the release
| of Microsoft's iron grip on software profitability in the
| late 90s.
| azemetre wrote:
| I feel like you've neglected that there was a massive
| lawsuit against big tech where Google, Adobe, Apple,
| Paypal, and others actively colluded with each other to
| suppress wages:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
|
| It really wasn't until after this lawsuit, along with
| Facebook actively making better offers, that tech salaries
| started to skyrocket. I'm the sure the bull market for 8
| years didn't hurt either.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us
| relative to what we bring to the table for them. This is
| true of every industry going on decades of increasing
| productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides
| greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an
| actual change going forward? Of course the demographics
| favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't.
| Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change
| that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do?
| Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work
| elsewhere? Interesting times we live in.
|
| Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned
| and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to
| minimize individual impact. VCs and MBAs famously refer
| to this as the bus principle: what would happen if the
| key employee or executive got hit by a bus today? How
| would the company fare? The metaphor is quite telling in
| its priors, assumptions, and priorities.
|
| All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax,
| retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to
| break into programming because of the benefits and pay.
| Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are
| expanding in my industry as well. How long until this
| drags down programmers as well? With the potential end of
| this bull marker will programming compensation stop being
| the highest paid field? I do wonder and doubt.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > It really wasn't until after this lawsuit, along with
| Facebook actively making better offers, that tech
| salaries started to skyrocket.
|
| No, the lawsuit had nothing to do with it. The market
| exploded because Facebook refused to join the cartel. The
| lawsuit fined the companies involved risible amounts and
| no one involved got fired or jail. Irrelevant.
| puranjay wrote:
| While I don't disagree with you at all, the current startup
| scene doesn't feel organic. So many of these "startups" are
| severely bloated and should have gone public ages ago.
|
| A simple look at the employee headcount at most unicorns is
| startling. A startup that's years away from IPO shouldn't have
| 5,000+ employees. At that point, you lose much of the agility
| startups are supposed to have in the first place.
|
| The constant inflow of private funding have allowed startups to
| acquire way too many bad habits and bureaucratic layers.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| TikTok required billions of dollars on ad spend to be able to
| compete. Definitely shows you can break into being a top-tier
| social product, but it maybe requires a lot of money to do in a
| short amount of time.
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