[aceperry]

Great article. Also brings up an aspect of the tech startup mentality that bothers me from time to time. From my reading of pg and ycombinator's focus on fast hockey stick like growth curves, it seems that you can easily dismiss/overlook small and steady businesses like Klippers which can perform very important roles in our lives.

I'm not criticizing pg and the ycombinator crowd, in fact I have much respect and admiration for what they're trying to achieve. But I think small businesses don't get the respect that they deserve.

[NhanH]

It's actually pretty interesting that small/lifestyle businesses get a lot of respect on Hacker News (pinboard, improvely, Appointment reminder and their creators are all very well revered here). In fact, a lot more than the general population (from my point of view) have for those businesses.

[aceperry]

It seems to me that the focus at HN is on startups that aim for huge growth, and not really small businesses; especially not small, stable businesses that don't have much potential to grow very large. The subject of the article is a small business that won't really scale well. One of the biggest topics of discussion at HN is around the topic of scaling a business.

I'm glad to see an article like this which reminds us that small businesses can be an important part of our society. I also see some efforts by some people in the ycombinator network to expand beyond the mechanics of doing startups. I attended last year's startup school and was blown away and inspired by one of the speakers, Danae Ringelmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPbHf4i6CrQ&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

[danieltillett]

This is because a pretty large percentage of the readers of HN are pretty smart - they recognise that a good lifestyle business is what smart people should be building.