[Silhouette]

It's not as if this is a new idea: look at Google and Facebook.

It just seems to be a different take on the usual VC funding strategy: The startup and its investors take a risk, and they are essentially banking on either getting big enough to secure their position effectively or receiving a good exit offer from someone bigger, before they fail.

I don't like a lot of the corners some startups cut, and the kind of thing I read on HN every day does make me wary of trusting any startup enough to become a customer. Then again, some of those startups have become a lot more successful than any of my businesses, so clearly for better or worse society as a whole tolerates the envelope-pushing model at least up to a point where it's worthwhile to have tried.

[fred_durst]

The concern I'm trying to relay here is that at this point no regulator wants to be seen as asleep at the wheel while the next Uber / Airbnb grows to become an 800 pound gorilla. It's all over the news. It's everywhere. So now we are starting to see regulators jump on startups early and hard(see the local SF regulators). In the past regulators would typically get in hot water for saying yes to things they maybe should not have. Now they can get in trouble for both yes and undecided. So now it is turning into, "Is this a startup? Then no". With a hard fast "no" the startup will wilt and die and the regulator will never end up in hot water because everyone will just forget about it. And we have Uber & Airbnb to thank for that. All I can hope is that their investors, founders and vested employees give back to the startup community generously to try and make up for the damage they've done.