[DethNinja]

On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation.

There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company.

Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed, you will need friends with connections to central banks.

[echelon]

I self-funded my startup to the tune of half a million dollars.

I've had what I can only assume to be a VC-funded competitor study my endpoints for high latency / expensive queries, then saturate them with millions of requests a second across thousands of simultaneous IP addresses.

Business is survival of the fittest. Pressures and growth gradients come in all shapes and sizes.

[tester457]

How did you mitigate the attack?

[echelon]

- Moved DNS to Cloudflare, which handled the brunt of it.

- IP and CIDR blocks

- A few trivial heuristics to catch certain behaviors they were using

- In-app query caching for read-only endpoints that serve the same data to all users

- Redis TTL caching for read-only endpoints that take view arguments. A means to manually expire on writes.

- Runtime control plane additions to dynamically block IPs/CIDRs, user accounts, and endpoints (if they find another hole to exploit, we can just block a few endpoints rather than the whole service)

- A tool to inject bad responses (we found another, probably different actor consuming and reselling our service)

[t0mas88]

Why would that be a VC funded competitor specifically?

[dazc]

Money to burn?

[jacquesm]

I had this happen, we survived though, and they failed (spectacularly so). Camarades/ww.com: 1, Spotlife: 0.

And Logitech, who backed Spotlife was more than gentlemanly about it, they sent us all of their traffic for years and years.

[dinp]

> On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation.

Would you be willing to give a few more details about what happened? I'm not interested in the identities of the companies or people, just interested in a high level overview of what happened. We don't hear these stories often.

[DethNinja]

- Hired a journalist on some mid-size news company to tarnish the company’s reputation. I never imagined they would bother to do this, but I was wrong.

- Used an APT for hire but I don’t believe they did succeed , still it is quite insane. I was lucky enough to catch a targeted rootkit but issue was quickly remediated. I’ll eventually find a consultant to analyse the Win 11 rootkit. They were definitely not script kiddies.

- Some black hat SEO and shills for hire, but that is expected.

I’m really surprised by hired journalist / APT aspect. Something I never imagined would happen, but apparently it does happen.

[uLogMicheal]

Between the bot farms, members of media in pockets, and inflation; the boat of traction does seem a bit rigged eh?

Probably someone asked long ago "What if traction itself could be a moat?" and the rest is history.

[jorvi]

> central banks

I think you mean big banks. Aside from maybe a line of communication due to their financial size, VCs have very little to do with the Fed or ECB.

[boppo1]

Well, directly, no. But QE and ZIRP were pretty fundamental in their current ubiquity.

[uLogMicheal]

You missed a step, it goes from the central banks to the LPs to the VCs. The big hedge funds that get all of that low/zero interest money are certainly active in private equity AND forcing their behaviors/policies on companies far and wide.

[imtringued]

You're saying this as if the central bank is forcing money into the economy when it really is a pull based system. The commercial banks ultimately decide how much money they want to issue and if they think you have a viable business they won't hesitate to give you a loan.

[littlestymaar]

Except you absolutely don't need any connection to the central bank to benefit from their monetary policy.

[uLogMicheal]

Want to explain? I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest and if anything the inflation hurts bootstrappers worse.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/wall-street-fed-bai...

The Fed selected BlackRock to run a groundbreaking program to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from large companies slammed by the coronavirus crisis.

Certainly these connections help?

[littlestymaar]

> I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest

Low interest rates doesn't mean loans are “easier” (this is going to depend on the risk policy of the specific bank, and is mostly unrelated to the interest rate), but it lowered the interest rate you'd pay for every loan no matter who you are (I personally bought a house with a .7% interest fixed mortgage in 2019, I didn't have to personally know Christine Lagarde for that).

> if anything the inflation hurts bootstrappers worse.

Low interest don't drive inflation up (we've had anemic inflation for a decade of low interest), if anything, inflation leads to interest rates hikes.

[uLogMicheal]

You're arguing with economics here...

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/09/06/what-causes-inflation/

Inflation rises when the Federal Reserve sets too low of an interest rate or when the growth of money supply increases too rapidly – as we are seeing now, says Stanford economist John Taylor.

I never said you needed central bank connections to get a home loan. To get infinite runway on unsecured risk is a very different area of privilege than secured home loans.

[consilient]

> Want to explain? I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest

A higher risk free rate means risky investments like VC funds are less attractive.

[uLogMicheal]

but VC investment was at a high while interest rates were low, and we now see a contraction in venture investment now that interest rates are rising?

[molave]

Not surprised. If they can't have you, then no one can. It's sad that startups either die quickly a hero or live long and be a villain.

[Sosh101]

I second this. Have had a similar experience.

[getmeinrn]

I'm interested, can you share?

[chris_j]

What does SSBC mean in this context?

[DethNinja]

Sorry, it was meant to be USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

[chris_j]

Many thanks, makes sense now.

[DeathArrow]

Can you share the story?