[AnthonyMouse]

>Again, much of this is market driven.

Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original post):

>Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices).

Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless doing them is necessary in order to still exist in 10 years. Because if you spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem.

"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big companies can afford to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to run out of investment capital before the product is finished.

I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are not among them.

I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities.

On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the efficient characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage.

I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation and the possibility of it being enforced is resulting in all of this widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something like antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't doing the job.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.

[jbail]

"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking

You'd be surprised.

My experience with Big Companies is that it's done "the wrong way" far more often than at the startups I've worked for.

The reasons for this are many, but none of them have anything to do with being able to afford it. You still have deadlines and managers who want stuff finished yesterday. More crucial than that, in my experience, Big Companies have far less capable talent as well as projects that have been marred by outsourcing adventures.

Again, only my experience, but I thought I'd share since it runs counter to yours.

[AnthonyMouse]

After I posted that I had seriously considered editing it to add the qualifier that it only applies to good big companies. Because the same stability and economies of scale that allow long-term investments and future proofing will under the wrong management instead provide a ready environment for inefficiency, laziness and incompetence to continue to exist for a long period of time without bankrupting the company.

[alexqgb]

In big companies, the idea that "there's no time to do it right" is often paired with the understanding that there's time to do it again, even if this rarely happens in practice.

Not having a runway or a burn rate to manage does a lot to increase the amount of "we'll just fix it later" thinking. Startups deal with technical debt as well, but there's a difference when it comes from a focus to get one thing absolutely right as opposed to a lack of interest in getting anything really right.

[trotsky]

I've never once heard the spectre of anti-trust enforcement cited as a strike against proposed M&A activity at any startup I've worked at. In fact such worries would be directly laughed at - I've never seen regulator interest in anything close to startup land. Consider facebook + instagram as an example of how far away you can get from really being startups yet not even broach the question of regulator review.

The main thing that seem to prevent similarly focused startups from joining together is a winner take all mentality in tech investors that discourages any kind of activity that's not winner/loser based or at least big fish/small fish based. The high valuations and the even higher expectations of investors make it very hard for series A or B round company A to absorb another company of that size. The lack of debt financing options in the valley doesn't help matters either.

When it comes down to it, a significant portion of your board is just going to be opposed to providing a "winning" class exit to any of your existing competitors unless they're primarily financed by the same people.

[AnthonyMouse]

I think you may be ignoring the shadow that long-standing laws cast on culture and practice.

The benefit from merging to monopoly is that you can avoid all the negative pressures that come from extreme competition. You can work 40 hours a week and not cut corners without worrying that someone who does will beat you to market. But that only works if you merge to monopoly -- two competitors merging when there are still five others doesn't get you that. And even if there are only two competitors at present, having them merge doesn't preclude the possibility that some others will spring up as soon as the ability to charge monopoly/oligopoly prices is on the table (which is why the antitrust authorities may not bother you in that case).

To get the benefit (and thus make it worth doing at all), you have to know that you can keep doing it -- that if another competitor shows up with the credible threat of breaking your monopoly, you can merge with them too. And if you can charge monopoly rents then that is exactly what would happen: Anyone qualified and willing to pose a credible competitive threat will threaten to enter the market and then it will become worth it for you to buy them out because retaining the ability to charge monopoly prices and continue working "only" 40 hour weeks is worth having to share the market, provided there are a sufficiently small finite number of such qualified people who would have to be cut in.

But you aren't guaranteed to be able to keep doing that without inviting antitrust scrutiny, especially after you become established. And if you can't be sure regulators will allow you to do it as many times as necessary then there is no incentive to start because the benefits only accrue as long as you can hold the monopoly.

[mniejiki]

Except you were talking about startups originally, don't change the scenario when someone points out flaws. Startups don't have the power or money to enforce a monopoly.

More than that, you're ignoring the reality of a merger which would be a lot of corporate politics ending up with most of the originals founders getting kicked out. The handful who played the game the best will end up getting the whole pie.

[AnthonyMouse]

>Except you were talking about startups originally, don't change the scenario when someone points out flaws. Startups don't have the power or money to enforce a monopoly.

Where did I stop talking about startups? All the participants, including startups, that compete for the same market would have the incentive to merge or collude, but only if they can ensure that no one defects or fails to join, because the first defector breaks the monopoly (especially in software where there is effectively infinite reproduction capacity). And they (startups included) could reliably do that with contracts and buyouts if it wasn't illegal, in any market with sufficiently few qualified participants. But it is illegal, which is why even startups don't -- not because it will necessarily be enforced against the startup during the first merger, but because they know that if it works and they ultimately achieve the end goal of a monopoly or cartel, that is what will raise antitrust scrutiny. So we don't start down that road because we know where it currently goes.

Also, I never intended to limit what I'm talking about to startups: I used a startup as an example, but this applies generally. Non-startup small businesses could benefit from working together in similar ways. (As could large businesses, though that quickly becomes the exemplification of why we don't allow it -- again, we still need something to address that.)

And I would also point out that trotsky started talking about mergers so I wrote to address that, but collusion would probably be easier and more manageable, especially if it could be legally enforced between business entities through contracts.

>More than that, you're ignoring the reality of a merger which would be a lot of corporate politics ending up with most of the originals founders getting kicked out. The handful who played the game the best will end up getting the whole pie.

How, if they all have to continue colluding in order for it to work? If you have unhappy former competitors they can quickly become happy future competitors. The only deal that works is the one that makes all the former competitors better off than they would have been otherwise. That might involve some of them not being involved in the operations anymore, but they would still get a piece of the pie.

[gbog]

"Take your time and do it right"

More often than not this means thinking about it a couple of hours more, and results in much faster development the next week, so for me the correct answer, even for start-ups, is " we can't afford doing it wrong"

[AnthonyMouse]

>More often than not this means thinking about it a couple of hours more, and results in much faster development the next week, so for me the correct answer, even for start-ups, is " we can't afford doing it wrong"

Sometimes, sure. Doing it right is always worth it if you have the time -- and if all it takes is a couple of hours then you almost always have the time. But sometimes doing it right means doing it over, because circumstances have chanced since you started, or there is a third party framework you can use which is clearly a bad fit for your application but the only alternative is to write your own from scratch. Then you're not talking about a few hours anymore, you're talking about a few months. Which you may or may not have.