Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192985

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

To people asking why he's giving it away for free: partially because it's content marketing (duh), but mostly because this has been a labor of love for him that he wants to let loose into the world.

Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.

0 - https://codenation.org/

Every single founder I know (and I know a lot of them) doesn't build a business for the specific reason to be acquired. Is it a thought that crosses their mind? Definitely. Is it something investors think about? Absolutely.

But the day-to-day, 12 hour+ grind for them is all about product-market fit and drawing revenue - the things that make a durable business.

Those mid sized companies you refer to did fine for three reasons:

* If they were competing against venture backed companies, they were likely playing in big markets. My bet is they are still alive today.

* They got acquired by the bigger companies and ended up capturing even more short term economic value than they would have otherwise.

* These venture backed companies expanded the market, actually helping smaller players. I would bet money that VRBO's business increased as AirBnB got bigger.

I agree that there's something sleazy about injecting a ton of capital in a niche space; at the very least, it's distorts all the dynamics in it. But you can't deny that this short term chaos creates long term economic value for everyone else.

Uber demonstrated you could add a tech layer to the taxi business and make it more efficient for riders + introduce a whole new set of people to the driver business. Did this harm existing taxi drivers? Unquestionably.

I know it's hard to look at that business model as innovation but it is because now there's extreme price pressure on these companies (esp Lyft) to remove the costliest part of the equation - the driver. So as a result, you have a ton of very motivated energy towards solving that, via autonomous driving.

It took mediocre business innovation[0] (uber) to drive meaningful tech innovation (autonomous driving).

[0] - Purposely differentiating the tech innovation (which Uber deserves a lot of credit for) vs the biz innovation (which last I read is getting better, though still shaky).

Hope it's just temporary.

This is an extreme position. More likely, we are seeing repricing occur. There are still worthy, venture backable ideas. Probably less of them than in the past.

One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.

You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.