[c0nducktr]

I wonder that so often, and the answer I find myself landing on is... greed.

It's greed. Investors want to make more money, they don't care about the product, or the experience in using the product. They just want more money. That's how the whole system is set up. It's sadly just how it is.

[EnKopVand]

I think it’s a little unfair to call it greed because of how the world operates. Dumped down a little the path for a successful company in the west is to have founders create a small company with a great culture that cultivates growth through a great product. Eventually bigger capital notices the rapid growth and invests, typically letting current and coming employees buy options at the same rate they do because they want to keep the culture until the IPO. Eventually the company has grown enough that it is now a large or even enterprise company while skipping all the steps in between because of the rapid growth, and with all the challenges that come with the that, and then the IPO launches. Talented capital will launch lower than they could, so that they can IPO at 100 and then truly sell out at 400-500 (made up numbers to give you the idea) a couple of years later where the company becomes a truly public company.

During those years the founders and much of the talent are very likely to leave the company. Partly because working for an enterprise wasn’t what they signed up for, but mainly because the rapid growth has likely stagnated, which means that you can get so much more out of your time building something new.

Your time is limited and how you get to spend it is directly tied to your wealth. Why would you waste either on something that doesn’t grow when you could be growing your wealth 40% a month on something else?

Maybe it’s greed, but it’s also how you play our system.

The only weird part about it all is why we aren’t teaching children financial impact and how to maximise it in schools. I mean, I had no idea how rigged the world is until we had our first million (in Danish KR, so around $150k). Simply being able of putting down 30% on the loan for our house ourselves means that we have around 10k DKK ($1500) more to ourselves, every month, compared our friends who are similar places in life minus the start capital and thus are paying those $1500 directly into the banks pockets.

[sudden_dystopia]

You don’t see the negative externalities of thousands of start ups growth hacking just so that they can IPO? And thousands of already public companies hacking growth to stay publicly traded?

Or do you just not want to see it?

[EnKopVand]

If you’re asking me if I know that the world isn’t fair then I hate to tell you this, but I feel a lot more guilty about the shady supply line that led to me being capable of writing this reply on my iPhone than of any work or investment I’ve ever personally been involved in.

That being said, I don’t agree with the sentiment that a company needs to “growth hack” to go from startup to successful IPO. It obviously happens, but a lot of companies succeed by selling something that is actually useful. It may not be as glamorous as working for a FAANG company, but you can make a pretty decent career out of helping non-tech companies scale beyond excel sheets.

[asoneth]

To be fair, it's not just investor greed that does it.

Plenty of good managers and engineers just want more money too. Once the hyper-growth stalls, many early employees cash out their lottery ticket and leave to take higher-paying jobs elsewhere. They don't care as much about maintaining the product and experience that they built as they do about making more money.

(And this is exacerbated by the fact that many people prefer building new things than to maintain the existing things they built.)

[addandsubtract]

Greed is just the byproduct of uncapped capitalism. Disincentivise the pursuit of constant growth, and the world would be a lot less evil.

[rosndo]

> Disincentivise the pursuit of constant growth, and the world would be a lot less evil.

Not only that, but perhaps the world would be a lot less.

[seti0Cha]

You're going to have to do some work to establish that. It's pretty clear from the historical record and from ancient literature that greed predates capitalism by millennia. You could argue that capitalism makes it worse, but I don't see much evidence of that in history.

[panick21_]

> Greed is just the byproduct of uncapped capitalism

No its a byproduct of human beings.

> Disincentivise the pursuit of constant growth, and the world would be a lot less evil.

Or actually it would be much worse.