[chefandy]

The way friends approached startups in the .com era seemed to be more like “hey, [friend]… we know how to write code, and we think we can address [thing] in [some market] better than [incumbent], so let’s spend nights and weekends hacking together a working proof of concept.

It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever.

Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.

[Earw0rm]

I think the problem with that approach, in today's market, comes when you try to hire.

Junior engineers didn't cost more than any other recent graduate, and as you could get away with a few rough edges in production for quite a while, you could put together an adequately balanced team for not much money.

The tooling was much worse, but the compliance burden was much less.

Did your friends in the .com era talk about "doing a startup" or "starting a business"? I feel like that's changed a bit, people are more calculated and cynical about how the game is to be played with respect to rounds, exit strategies and so on. The "startup" model specifically means something a bit different to "starting a business", around ambition, scale, investment model etc. All businesses need to be started, but not all businesses are startups.

[chefandy]

I don’t think the idea of starting a business in tech these days commonly exists independently of the modern tech conception of “doing a startup.” And with the hiring part, the idea was that you’d do the work yourselves and only hire anyone at all when you couldn’t do the work anymore, or you got a big enough contract/sale/etc that you could pay them. The fact that the exit strategy/investment/initial expensive hiring messiness exists is the symptom, not the cause. What I don’t really get is the cause, and I suspect it’s cultural rather than logistical. Not doing something unless you can ramp it fast enough to start worrying about paying anyone other than the people that decided to do it is a deliberate choice. In a restaurant, it’s not. You literally can’t do it without the initial investment. My dad was a mechanical engineer in a startup making industrial paper handling equipment in the 90s— one of the first hires after the handful of founders worked themselves to design and fabricate the first machines securing them the contracts to afford more employees.

[Earw0rm]

That's partly because of growth based valuations, and fast-acting network effects. The whole model is predicated on "get there fast, get the monopoly". Which you can't either with a traditional, non-scalable business (restaurants) or even a scalable industrial business (cars) - yes you get economy of scale, but they benefit relatively little from network effects of other people owning them. Goods like fashion which don't need a service ecosystem, even less so.

Total scalability & strong network effect points toward a "get the monopoly, now" business model. Which, IDK, might suit some things but definitely isn't the right fit for all things tech.

[chefandy]

Right — I totally understand why things are the way they are using the tech industry startup model. But using that model is relatively new, and adopting it not a prerequisite to starting a tech business, even if that’s the only way people do it these days, generally. Becoming a monopoly immediately in some market is the goal of someone that wants to become the monopoly immediately in some market. It’s neither a requirement of, nor mutually exclusive of having a good idea that you want to turn into a business. That business goal might be easier in technical businesses, but it doesn’t seem to make better or more sustainable companies. “That’s the way it is done” is usually the worst reason for doing something. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but it definitely doesn’t mean it’s good.

[Earw0rm]

Agreed, but it distorts the heck out of it for everyone in tech trying to do anything else. Salaries is just the most obvious way.

[satvikpendem]

The pendulum is swinging back it seems. More and more people that I know are now interested in starting bootstrapped businesses, growing them to $10k MRR or more then continuing them along or selling. Sites like Indie Hackers have popularized this model this decade than the 2010s which seemed laden with venture capital, most likely because it was the age of ZIRP.

[Suppafly]

>Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground.

This, but also it's a bit like gambling, this is the high risk / high reward way to do startups. The slower way is more stable, but you don't get to have fun with other people's money while you're building the business.

[chefandy]

Sure. What strikes me as strange, however, is the attitude that this is the only possible path to starting your own business in tech. Sure you’re not going to start up your own social network, but maybe you’ve got a great idea for some kind of QoL thing that helps people work with these big inflexible systems? Many of these startups seem to be shit at providing expertly personalized or customized services because they’re trying to be a big at-scale corporation from day one. Maybe you devise a way to semi-automate customized solutions for some common enterprise thing too sticky for at-scale services to address specifically so companies have to do it in—house? It seems like there are problems that would be easier to address with a small business like that which could organically grow into something sustainable. Definitely not sexy, and I think people making tech startups currently are often more interested in sexy than anything else.

[andrewf]

I think compared to 15 years ago there's (1) more capital (2) more founders [enabled by better tooling and well-known implementation patterns] (3) less low hanging fruit on the product side. Any given opportunity is more likely to have other, well-resourced, folks chasing it hard.

[chefandy]

> less low hanging fruit on the product side. Any given opportunity is more likely to have other, well-resourced, folks chasing it hard.

I think this is the biggest factor that actually affects the fundamentals of selling tech. To my eye, every other aspect is some form of Gordon Gecko business insanity and/or VC people looking to stoke egos by making people with good ideas feel like big shot executives while figuring out how soon they can throw it all in a juicer and extract a bunch of cash.