Not sure why this is being downvoted - anyone who has worked at a venture backed startup will find at least aspects of your argument to match their experience.
The game at companies that have achieved high valuations prior to IPO is to get to IPO or be acquired. To grow toward market dominance in their sector or to threaten an existing player while being cheaper to purchase than to duplicate rapidly.
Having worked at one such rapidly growing 'unicorn' myself, every decision made by senior management was made in order to please investors. Competition, our tech stack, even the product itself were basically irrelevant. What mattered was how the investors perceived the company - i.e.: how much we resembled the kind of company that they saw as likely to recoup 1000X.
This resulted in very strange cargo cult behaviour. Fo example my whole department existed to replicate a similar department in our major competitor. Incidentally that department has since been liquidated and replaced with a variety of off the shelf AI solutions. Our customers had little interest in the 'value' we created in any case.
We also purchased just about every SAAS solution imaginable. Because that's what shiny highly capitalised startups do. Our onboarding included two full weeks of 'interactive' videos, with tests.
It wasn't just SAAS either - everything we did was performative. Including custom outfitting a carbunkle office in a landmark building on the most expensive street of our country's capital.
The founders weren't eccentric nineteen year olds and our product wasn't some crypto scam or half baked AI offering, although it was itself a service. The founders' behaviour made complete rational sense. They were optimising to appear successful to the investors whose valuations made them appear successful to other investors. They used these investments to 'build a runway' for the tech industry contraction that was obviously coming, but also to gobble up every other similar company in their sector. I believe the industry we operated in is now essentially a duopoly, with EU level data protection regulations being the moat that prevents it from becoming a monopoly.
I think there's an explicit rule on hn against metacommentary on voting, but it can be a useful signal of the vibes within the community as a whole, and I do think that critically examining the VC model of tech startups kind of edges close to the sacred cows of this particular community (it is a public forum, but it's also ycombinator). But even if you're not bought into that particular organization's messaging, I do sympathize with not wanting to feel like your life's work is executing a bunch of cargo-cult behaviors to keep some investors who make all the real decisions happy with you. While I do think what I said was based on my best attempt at a sober assessment of reality, a synthesis of my own direct experience and the described experience of friends and colleagues and glances at the overall landscape from broad reporting done by various sources, it's a really bitter and painful thing to understand
The game at companies that have achieved high valuations prior to IPO is to get to IPO or be acquired. To grow toward market dominance in their sector or to threaten an existing player while being cheaper to purchase than to duplicate rapidly.
Having worked at one such rapidly growing 'unicorn' myself, every decision made by senior management was made in order to please investors. Competition, our tech stack, even the product itself were basically irrelevant. What mattered was how the investors perceived the company - i.e.: how much we resembled the kind of company that they saw as likely to recoup 1000X.
This resulted in very strange cargo cult behaviour. Fo example my whole department existed to replicate a similar department in our major competitor. Incidentally that department has since been liquidated and replaced with a variety of off the shelf AI solutions. Our customers had little interest in the 'value' we created in any case.
We also purchased just about every SAAS solution imaginable. Because that's what shiny highly capitalised startups do. Our onboarding included two full weeks of 'interactive' videos, with tests.
It wasn't just SAAS either - everything we did was performative. Including custom outfitting a carbunkle office in a landmark building on the most expensive street of our country's capital.
The founders weren't eccentric nineteen year olds and our product wasn't some crypto scam or half baked AI offering, although it was itself a service. The founders' behaviour made complete rational sense. They were optimising to appear successful to the investors whose valuations made them appear successful to other investors. They used these investments to 'build a runway' for the tech industry contraction that was obviously coming, but also to gobble up every other similar company in their sector. I believe the industry we operated in is now essentially a duopoly, with EU level data protection regulations being the moat that prevents it from becoming a monopoly.