Comment by JustExAWS

Comment by JustExAWS 2 days ago

And the ideas may or may not be bad. I don’t know enough about any of the business segments. But to paraphrase the famous Steve Jobs quote “those aren’t businesses, they are features” [1] that a company that is already in the business should be able to throw a few halfway decent engineers at and add the feature to an existing product with real users.

[1] He said that about Dropbox. He wasn’t wrong just premature. For the price of 2TB on Dropbox, you can get the entire GSuite with 2TB or Office365 with 1TB for up to five users for 5TB in all.

fragmede 2 days ago

now you can, but, what, are you gonna lie down and wait for tech giants to do everything? Not every company needs to be Apple. If Dropbox filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, they've still made millionaires of thousands of people and given jobs to hundreds more, and enabled people to share their files online.

Steve Jobs gets to call other companies small because Apple is huge, but there are thousands of companies that "are just features". Yeah, features they forgot to add!

Apple still doesn't make cases for their phones.

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JustExAWS 2 days ago

Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about a dozen have gone public, the rest are either dead, zombies or got acquired. These are all acquisition plays.
Even the ones that have gone public haven’t done that well in aggregate.
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
Dropbox was solving a hard infrastructure problem at scale. These companies are just making some API calls to a model.
If an established company in any of these verticals - not necessarily BigTech - see an opportunity, they are either going to throw a few engineers at the problem and add it as a feature or hire a company like the one I work for and we are going to knock out an implementation in a few months.
The one YC company I mentioned above is expecting to have their product written by one “full stack engineer” that they are only willing to pay $150K for. How difficult can it be?

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- fragmede 2 days ago
  
  > These are all acquisition plays.
  Which seems fine? VC money gets thrown at a problem, the problem may or may not get solved by a particular team, but a company gets created, some people do some work, some people make money, others don't. I don't get it. Are you saying no one should bother doing anything because someone else is already doing it or that it's not difficult so why try?
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  JustExAWS 2 days ago
  
  I’m pushing back against this…
  > Not every company needs to be Apple
  These aren’t people deciding to build “companies” - ie create a product that people want and turn a profit. They are a legal Ponzi scheme.
  
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