[epolanski]

That's not what your African friends think, that's literally a very huge part of the startup ecosystem anywhere.

I have worked in few startup incubators, and most of the companies I've seen are merely interested in getting a good evaluation and getting bought from someone else.

The amount of startups I've seen with the interest of actually making any "profit" is very low.

I think this is also a reflection of several changes in how stock markets have changed in the last decade where the name of the game hasn't been anymore about making a successful product that makes money and possibly pays dividends but the chase for endless and endless growth of stock price.

There are companies out there that literally have the stock of their price in the hall of their offices, imagine that and not customer satisfaction/retention/profits or anything else being the biggest indicator of a company's success.

It's a sad reality.

I myself am interested in creating a new business in the tech world, one that makes honest good money but is not seeking a 100M/1B valuation and I feel such a unicorn.

[SV_BubbleTime]

The era of Free Money couldn’t end fast enough. We’re likely in for some hard times, but it wasn’t sustainable, and we had a 10 year period with almost zero innovation.

I hope it works out, because seriously the last decade plus shouldn’t have gone down the way it did.

[WanderPanda]

Incredible opportunity costs, considering e.g. Google could probably go through Twitter like, 80-90% cuts and still stay functioning. Keeping the most capable people in golden handcuffs for a decade is quite a tragedy. On the other hand they still worked on many open source projects so it could have probably been worse

[zx8080]

Isn't is because of a "free money" thing?

[SV_BubbleTime]

IMO, absolutely.

I just don’t know who exactly to blame for that. It seems to be a competition between gov spending, “quantitative easing” (brrrrrrrrrt), and the Fed’s insistence that near zero percent rates forever would work. It seems to me that all of those cause the other though.

[throwawaysleep]

> I have worked in few startup incubators, and most of the companies I've seen are merely interested in getting a good evaluation and getting bought from someone else.

Startup incubators seem like they would be biased towards those looking for an easy pre-paved path. I participated for one in university and less than half of that cohort was interested in ever making money or getting traction at all, including myself.

We were there to polish our resumes for job hunting upon graduation.

My team didn't make a single sales call or engage with a single customer. The program managers brought us an extremely large potential government contract (15 million) and we turned them down as it was after the program ended and we were planning to be job hunting.