2
points
rexreed
Joined 6,530 karma
A little bit of this, a little bit of that
- rexreed parentYeah and a lot of these are small only temporarily. Many of these startups are following the grow-at-all-costs VC philosophy that doesn't optimize for small team size. So I'm trying to find those alternate stories. Much harder to find, so when I see the post like this of OP's, I get excited. Hard to find stories of teams that are small by intent, but looking to scale big.
- I'm looking for companies that are small by intent, but also looking to scale sustainably and grow beyond the capabilities of a single person. There are a lot of small businesses / solopreneurs / freelancers who work enough to get by or do a few hundred $K as a salary replacement, but aren't looking to build anything bigger. A lot of those companies also go by the wayside when the founder retires, gets hired, or something happens. And there's already a lot of content and sources for those types of solopreneur / single founder freelancers / side hustle type businesses.
I'm looking for the other stories of small teams scaling big. I'm basically separating side-hustles and solopreneurs as freelancers from a more sustainable business. Revenue is a cutoff as a way to differentiate, but doesn't have to be the only one.
For sure however, a team of 5 doing $20M implies something significant is happening at scale versus a solopreneur making what would otherwise be salary-replacement level money. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love solopreneurship. Just trying to find those other stories, which are much harder to find.
- One of the top comments (https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1o4jup6/i_aud...):
"Step 1: Don't listen to anything OP said.
OP lies about going to Harvard. He thinks he can put it on his linkedin just because he did an 8 hour online course from HarvardX on basics of leadership.
So assuming OP didn't lie about his experiences in start-ups (he 100% did lie), his diagnosis of the issues make no sense.
Unindexed db is just pure incompetence so if this is your problem then you have many more things to worry about, like learning the basics of programming.
Automatic testing is not required in start-ups and often comes at much later stages.
Auth vulnerabilities by themselves would never fail a start-up. Only data leakages caused by them would. So it's a very weird point.
There is rarely such a thing as bad code, all the code written by other people is bad while all the code written by me is either perfect or I have an excuse. It's always like that. Saying you should "improve" your code so that the devs spend less time wrestling with it is an insane statement, beyond basic quality controls. Bad code is almost always code that does something in a way that unexpected new reqs were not accounted for. And you can't expect the unexpected.
Autoscaling servers is hard. It's always better to just get what you need and then some. Within reason of course. And then leave the actual deployment optimization to dev ops engineers that you can hire later.
The post is really nonsensical. If there is one thing you should learn, it's to recognize obvious slop and outright lies.
EDIT: Also OP most likely bought upvotes. Weekend numbers like this make no sense. Especially on such a low quality post. And his linkedin is a trove of obvious lies and misrepresentations, even sneakily claiming he founded a company with 80k customers, while in reality he worked for an already established company with 80k customers as a low level employee, and then wording his claim in such a way where he has plausible deniability.
"
Perhaps this post was a way to gain customers?
- Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.
Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.
Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
- Here's what IPCam says about Reolink. Mostly bad night time performance: https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/convince-me-reolink-is-bad-to-...
- This is cool. I wonder, as you were iterating on the design and development, why didn't you start with a very small grid (10x10) to validate or test different options for their practicality and operation before scaling up to the 1000 pixel versions? It might have saved a lot of time and money, but maybe small scale tests aren't sufficient to work out the kinks?
- I am of the firm belief the solopreneurship is the future, especially with the power of AI. I don't believe corporations of any type, from startup to tech giant have the interests of anyone but the majority shareholders in mind. Employees, customers, partners, all get the shaft. When money is involved, startups aren't product companies, they're financial instruments.
- It doesn't hurt to be brib...incentivizing the F1000 CISOs (not my words, see article) : https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc
"The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund. Although it may be considered "small money", the jumps between the first stages of fundraising are the most difficult. “Until a ‘regular’ startup company reaches sales of $2-10 million it grinds itself to a pulp, but with Gili Ra'anan, this happens in the first year of sales. He creates a mechanism that is difficult to compete against because his companies immediately jump to a valuation of $100-200 million, raise more money, and then also have more resources to compete later,” a partner in an Israeli venture capital fund tells Calcalist. “With a seemingly small purchase of $100,000-$200,000, a CISO increases a startup's value by dozens of times.”"
...
"I recruited a new CISO for a financial organization that I managed out of a desire to refresh the cyber defense system. I gave him a free hand because I trusted him and I see this position as a position of trust. Six months later, I noticed that, surprisingly, almost all of the new logos that the CISO introduced were portfolio companies of Cyberstarts [Of which Wiz is their most notable]," describes a former senior executive at a large financial institution in the U.S. "It's not that these were necessarily bad solutions, but that some of them were a very low priority for us or solved problems that were not particularly urgent. After I confronted the CISO on the subject, he admitted that he is on the list of advisers of Cyberstarts and receives a percentage of the funds from them. Shortly after this, he left the company and immediately upon the appointment of a new CISO, I asked him to inform me if he was contacted by Cyberstarts. Within a few weeks, he had already received an email from them with a description of their kind of 'loyalty program' that details exactly what he will receive the more he works with the fund."
- I migrated from Quickbooks to Manager.io and haven't looked back. It keeps getting better and stronger, and is desktop based (free) with a cloud-based version as well (paid) and well supported: https://www.manager.io/
- I wouldn't necessarily call growth-hacking / blitzscaling to capture customers at a loss network effects. More accurately it's about cornering the market or dominating market share. Network effects are more prominent for things like social media networks where the network value grows exponentially with scale. But not as much for a B2C or B2B solution where there's an identifiable or fixed number of customers and the rocket fueled competitor captures them all with unsustainable pricing.
- Profitable startup works for founders, but it doesn't work for the venture capital industry.
But it's hard to be a profitable, bootstrapped startup when rocket fueled / venture-backed startups are too busy growth hacking and venture-funded blitzscaling to capture customers at low cost to the customer, only later to screw the customer when it comes time to either flip the company to a buyer in order to return those VC dollars, or to turn the screws on the customers and enshittify the product when blitzscaling is no longer feasible.
Personally, I prefer a bootstrapped, profitable startup in markets where blitzscaling venture-backed rockets aren't raiding the customers.
- If the predictions are meant to be bold, then yes. If they're meant to be fairly obvious, then no.
For example, saying that flying cars will be in widespread use NET 2025 is not much of a prediction. I think we can all say that if flying cars will be in widespread use, it will happen No Earlier Than 2025. It could happen in 2060, and that NET 2025 prediction would still be true. He could mark it green in 2026 and say he was right, that, yes, there are no flying cars, and so mark his scorecard another point in the correct column. But is that really a prediction?
A bolder prediction would be, say "Within 1-2 yrs of XX".
So what is Rodney Brooks really trying to predict and say? I'd rather read about what the necessary gating conditions are for something significant and prediction-worthy to occur, or what the intractable problems are that would make something not be possible within a predicted time, rather than reading about him complain about how much overhype and media sensation there is in the AI and robotics (and space) fields. Yes, there is, but that's not much of a prediction or statement either, as it's fairly obvious.
There's also a bit of an undercurrent of complaint in this long article about how the not-as-sexy or hyped work he has done for all those years has gone relatively unrewarded and "undeserving types" are getting all the attention (and money). And as such, many of the predictions and commentary on them read more as rant than as prediction.
- I like Rodney Brooks, but I find the way he does these predictions to be very obtuse and subject to a lot of self-congratulatory interpretation. Highlighting something green that is "NET2021" and then saying he was right when something happened or didn't happen, when something related happened in 2024 mean that he predicted it right or wrong, or is everything subject to arbitrary interpretation? Where are the bold predictions? Sounds like a lot of fairly obvious predictions with a lot of wiggle room to determine if right or wrong.
- 1 point