If I understood correctly they mean that these uplifting stories end up not panning out and it’s more about publicity than accomplishing the thing. I’m genuinely curious about the kind of SDR that works for a price like this and how you fit it into a $500 BOM.
I think that might be a bit harsh. Have there been scams on Kickstarter and other type places? Sure. Are all of them scams? Doubtful. Some people just have no experience creating a viable company selling a product that they designed. It takes people by surprise by how expensive and difficult it can be. Sadly, they find out the hard way after spending all of the money raised on redesigns and other unexpected deviations from the happy path original plan. That does not mean they were a scam from the start though
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term.
That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
El Salvadorians (from The country) would starkly disagree with you. It took a dictator and a martial state (no human rights) to end maras in less than five years. The culture is the same.
They just replaced the street gangs with a single state operated gang. El Salvadorians still have to live in fear for their lives, but it will be the government coming for them.
Nuclear has a ton of VC interest right now. Or the robinhood dude with his space beaming stuff.
I think anything you can do to add to the energy mix is worthwhile atm. Does America produce any domestic solar panels? I’m talking wafers not assembly.
TLDR software startups don’t need as much capital in AI era so bootstrapping is more feasible. VC still needed for hard tech.
In general I don’t agree. I think the author is severely discounting the impact of VC. But I do agree it’s probably never been easier to run a legitimate business with 1-a few people.
Feels like a naive view of capital. If your direct competitor has $10M they are most likely going to beat you because more resources are generally better than less. If I can out market you it often doesn’t matter that your product is superior.
Everything else being the same, more resources are better than less. Yet, VC money comes with strings attached.
VC doesn't want a startup to become just a healthy business. It needs to grow at a breakneck speed. In fact, for a VC, it's better to put pressure on somewhat successful startups to take a moonshot at becoming unicorns, even at the grave risk of going bust instead.
The expectation to spend the funding round in 12-18 months is a well-established pattern. So you get millions, but you have to spend it fast.
Running a product development consultancy, I routinely see products/businesses that could have been built for a fraction of what they cost. You don't need to hire hundreds of developers (pre-2026) and instantly have huge misalignment and coordination issues. You don't need to tokenmaxx the crap of everything (2026), ballooning your AI spend and generating a ton of bloat. That is, unless someone pressures you to spend fast because it's their shot at you becoming a unicorn.
The US was not supposed to come out ahead. This is crony capitalism. Think about all the money Trump JR can make selling drones and all the VC companies benefiting from defense spending!
What I don’t understand is how the stock market can be so decoupled from reality. It’s a game at this point and completely disconnected from reality. Everything should be down 20%+ given oil is an input to everything and yet stocks are ATHing.
Basically there's a lot of money out there floating around, especially after we pumped with COVID. It has to go somewhere, and mostly ends up in asset appreciation (stocks and real estate).
You're right though that the reality of shortages via a missing 20% supply of oil is a problem, and with all this cash floating around will eventually show itself as stagflation. That said, oil's pass-through to the broad indexes is historically weaker than it feels, so the pain will likely hit consumer purchasing power and corporate margins before it really shows up in the headline stock numbers.
Stocks (naturally) price in inflation before inflation becomes headlines everywhere. People uncertain about the dollar trying to shelter their wealth from inflation will move to stocks to shield themselves.
idk, I read an analysis recently that retail investors in funds like the S&P500 are breaking how the stock market is "supposed" to work since people keep pumping the same money every month for retirement into the same 500 companies (or whatever an index is funding) without consequence to their actions, so they're never punished. Line goes up. The purchasing power of the masses outweighs the old brokerage class that decided which companies succeeded based on "real merits".
>keep pumping the same money every month for retirement into the same 500 companies (or whatever an index is funding) without consequence to their actions, so they're never punished.
When a buyer buys a stock, they are not giving money to the business.
Als, businesses get removed from the SP500 all the time:
They generally have to perform (profit, profit margin, revenue growth, market share growth, political influence growth, etc), and the higher the performance, the more their shares are worth (obviously).
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