[onion2k]

Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one factor is always customers. Do you have any?

This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy (directly or able to raise funds from within their own network of friends and family). 15 years ago seed capital was exactly that - money that was available to fund a startup based on little more than an idea and a persuasive team. It was massively high risk but that was kind of the point. The taste for risk that VCs once had is gone. Today what people call seed rounds are really Series A. You need to have already done the high risk proof of concept work and actually have something on the market before VCs will take your call.

That's entirely up to VCs of course. If they want to do that they can. And no doubt they'll still make a lot of money. But society as a whole is faced with dull ideas thought up by middle class kids who want "innovative" ways to pay someone to do their chores because of it, and that pisses me off a lot.

End Rant.

[GuiA]

Well, that's what happens when everything "standardizes" after the initial wave of disruption.

15 years ago, there weren't any "programming bootcamps" or "entrepreneurship workshops" or "become a UX ninja in 7 days crash course" to the extent that there is today, Harvard MBAs didn't give much of a crap about working in tech, computer science students were there for the nerdy stuff, not because they wanted to be the next Zuckerberg.

There just isn't much risk left in tech. The path is that now you start a weird crypto startup (which aren't even that weird anymore because there's dozens of them) while you're comfy at Stanford, you hope to get a fat check before you graduate, and if not you go work to Google. Or you quit Google, start your company, get some investment because you were at Google after all, and hopefully a few years later your startup gets bought by Google.

Tech startups just aren't weird and new and unknown anymore, as far as the money people are concerned. Does it fit their idea of what a company on its way to a billion dollar valuation looks like? If yes write a check, if not tell them thank you and let the next team in.

[snowwrestler]

Isn't this down to the rise of angel investors, though? I feel like that concept has exploded in the last decade, and established VC's have moved "up market" in response to it--hence their first look is now more like a Series A than a seed.

Has available seed capital declined overall or is it just coming from different places now?

[nwsm]

> But society as a whole is faced with dull ideas thought up by middle class kids who want "innovative" ways to pay someone to do their chores because of it, and that pisses me off a lot.

If true:

1) VCs will stop making money, or there is an endless money stream available to boring startups as long as the barrier to entry is kept up.

2) We will see stagnation in many industries but particularly tech, which will only make it easier for actual innovation to shine.

The endless money stream bit could be true, but if we accept that it negates 2), we should just give up anyway (or shift all focus to politics until it's solved).

[toohotatopic]

>This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy

There's your startup. Get some money and invest it in all those teams that need initial funding.

You may also want to establish an online forum for young entrepreneurs and engineers to hang out and discuss news and ideas so that they know about you and approach you once they need the funding.

[wpietri]

I don't disagree, but 15 years ago it was much more expensive to do a startup. This was before AWS and Rails was just getting started, so just getting something up and visible was a major technological effort. Now I can spend a day writing some Terraform code and have an infinitely scalable, load-balanced cluster up and running. A day later and I can have a decent-looking basic CRUD app on the cluster.

Then I can spin a lot of the other work off to pay-as-you-go SaaS tools. Payments, sales support, CRM, support, marketing, analytics, feature flags, landing pages, A/B testing: all of these are things I don't have to build any more. And now thanks to the rise of things like Slack, Zoom, and Trello, remote and/or part-time work is much more tenable, meaning we don't need an office and full-time commitment to get going.

So yes, VCs are going to take minimum risk for maximum return. But they always have. What's different now is that you don't need to convince some rando that you need $250k in seed money just to find out if your idea might work. If it does, you'll at least be in a better negotiating position. And maybe you won't need to seek investment at all.

[est31]

> This was before AWS and Rails was just getting started, so just getting something up and visible was a major technological effort.

Before rails there was LAMP. That's what Facebook used. Java servlets existed as well. And rented clouds existed before AWS as well. Despite the hype for them on pages like this, neither AWS nor Rails were really big disrupting inventions. The market for both existed before them, and will exist after they've fallen out of favour.

Where innovation happened is in the scaling domain. Terraform, kubernetes, etc, as well as in the SaaS tools you mentioned. But most of those things aren't needed for earliest stage startups. You don't need to be super scalable from day one. You can just run everything from one very powerful box for a while.

Of course this all depends on what your application is. If your product is a cloud based tool to post process movies, it will be a different setting from a CRUD app to plan events.

[wpietri]

In some sense, nothing has been really disruptive since the web browser. But that doesn't matter because what I'm talking about is reduced cost, reduced accidental complexity, reduced systemic latency.

Having lived through it, it's just loads easier to get something up and going these days. I ended up back in some Java code again recently, and servlets are a) a pain, and b) a general-purpose abstraction. They're adequate for a lot of things, but not particularly great at anything. Whereas these days people have had 15 years to come up with special-purpose code to accelerate all sorts of common activities. My point wasn't that AWS and Rails were the only good things that happened in 15 years. It's that those, which now seem old and boring, were near beginning of a whole wave of innovation aimed at making it easy to have a consumer-grade user experience up and running.

[mgamache]

Sure executing some ideas are cheaper and infrastructure can be purchased cheaply. But this covers a subset of all startups. For example: Let's say you wanted to do a med-tech startup. You'll have to work for at least two years without pay to get a non-medical device product launched.

[wpietri]

Undoubtedly. And I'd bet that in those areas you can still find seed money before you get customers. My point wasn't, "All startups are easy now!"

It was that investors aren't going to pay for anything they don't have to. If there's a sufficient stream of web/mobile based startups coming to them who already have some proof, they're going to be much less likely to fund people who don't have that proof yet.

[onion2k]

The problem is that if your idea isn't a CRUD app then finding funding to pay for the expenses is effectively impossible outside of raising from friends and family. VC funds (and especially public money that VCs control) should be invested in genuine innovation, not yet-another-Uber-for-meal-kits.

[wpietri]

I agree that would be nice if it were true. But that's manifestly not the business VCs are in. Their behavior is a pretty predictable outcome of our society's current ideology around capital.

That could change, of course. The pandemic is making it clear how threadbare that ideology is, so perhaps we'll return to valuing things beyond a high rate of shareholder return.

[mgamache]

This is correct. Big capital ideas can only be funded by wealthy people who have the ideas. Wealthy people by definition, have an interest in perpetuating the system that made them wealthy.