6 ms·

There are a lot of companies that should probably be 5 people in a basement somewhere run in the cloud... but everyone wants the VC money, big offices, huge tea

There are a lot of companies that should probably be 5 people in a basement somewhere run in the cloud... but everyone wants the VC money, big offices, huge teams and such. Maybe the whole current situation will change attitudes back toward lean and mean which always seems to be when tech does it’s best work.

RedShift1 6y ago
Plus things are often over engineered...
- qaq 6y ago
  Are you suggesting people don't need Hadoop, Cassandra, Spark , Kafka ... etc to run a website with 3 forms and 2Gb of data? How dare you?
  - derision 6y ago
    But then it's not big data, it's just a database and that's not investment grade
azinman2 6y ago
Won’t be great for employment numbers....
- Shacklz 6y ago
  I actually don't think so - to me it seems that the market still has strong demand for software engineers. What I do think however is that we might start to see a shift of talent towards more "mundane, boring" jobs. Less over-engineering apps for fancy startups on VC-lifesupport, more CRUD-apps for SME, big corps, government and whoever else seemingly less attractive than some cash-burning unicorn. And for society, it might be for the better. Too many startups these days seem to be focused on value extraction instead of creation (meetup might be one of the few exceptions).
slg 6y ago
>Maybe the whole current situation will change attitudes back toward lean and mean which always seems to be when tech does it’s best work. If history is any indication, we will learn this lesson, practice if for a little while, forget it, and be retaught it again in 6-12 years.
Apocryphon 6y ago
It's like we never learned anything from the VC excesses of the dot com bubble, other than delaying when you IPO.
0xfffafaCrash 6y ago
The idea that a company on the scale of Meetup could be effectively run by 5 people in a basement strikes me as completely absurd. I've seen similar comments about companies like Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and even Facebook and I'm really in awe of how completely out of touch with the reality of what it takes to run a global business with millions of users and customers people have to be to suggest these things. Do people imagine you can just take the UI, have a few people wire it up to scale in "the cloud" and basically call it a day?
- mgoblu3 6y ago
  Even as someone working on a really big global app with hundreds of engineers, people also underestimate that although the core of something might not be all that complex, all the auxiliary parts and necessary edge cases add tons of complexity that you have to handle if you want a complete product. You can only get away dodging that for so long.
- bko 6y ago
  Honest question: what are the issues that a company like meetup faces that would require a large team or significant funding?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Translations, international money handling, local market research / contacts, SEO, marketing/ads/visibility, ... I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
    - umeshunni 6y ago
      Everything you said + content moderation, dealing with policy/harassment etc. Anytime you’re allowing end users to create content on your platform or use your service to interact with other people, you have to deal with all the policy and icky people stuff.
jahaja 6y ago
You guess that you can't pump and dump a company into an IPO with only double-digit number of employees.
tqi 6y ago
What are some examples of consumer companies of this size that run super lean? Meetup had 35M users two years ago, so lets say something in the range of 3M-5M monthly actives for the sake of simplicity.
quickthrower2 6y ago
Enter stage left: Craigslist
jtolmar 6y ago
A lot of the best startup advice is packaged coupled with VC fundraising advice, and if unless you think to question it then it seems like the natural thing to do. This very site was founded by the community that formed around a bunch of startup advice essays Paul Graham wrote to advertise his venture capital business. And in the very low-capital-requirement world of pure tech, VC funding is actually kind of as strange choice. A lot of startups would be much better off as coops.
cactus2093 6y ago
I was just thinking about this recently. SAAS tools have gotten so expensive. For any given tool you use, inevitably the team building it is VC backed and wants to continually expand into more and more tangential areas and be able to afford a higher and higher CAC to grow into a 10 billion dollar business. There's often really no need for it, either the expanded use cases are irrelevant to many customers or it starts to overlap-but-not-quite-fully-replace another tool customers are already using and happy with. Pagerduty is a prime example I have followed for a long time. It used to be so simple and just let you set up recurring rotations and used twilio to alert the current on-call person. You might even be able to set the original product up today with zapier for just a few cents per alert. I don't remember their early pricing, but my memory is it used to be very cheap. Now they're a public company with a huge enterprise sales team and their lowest tier is $29 per user, and there are all kinds of extra features they want to up-sell you on from there that most people don't need. Sure that's not so expensive in the scheme of things, but if there are 20 different little utilities like this you want to use it adds up. (While I'm at it, that reminds me of another of the terrible patterns I see from all of these kinds of companies now, the per-seat pricing model even when the resource you're using doesn't scale that way. Want to set up CI builds in CircleCI? Surely they'll charge us for machine capacity. Well guess what, they also charge $15 per month per seat. You want folks on other teams who use different tools to ever be able to check in on the status of a build? Too bad, buy every one of them their own seat. If someone new ever even accidentally tries to sign in with github and you haven't provisioned a seat for them, CircleCI will actually stop running your builds until an admin goes in to upgrade your plan). Anyway, it feels that there's a massive opportunity for a self-funded team of 5 or 10 people or in some cases maybe even 1 person to build a great lifestyle business that takes on the original focused use case of some of these ubiquitous SAAS platforms, but undercuts the big bloated business they are today on price by a huge amount.

RedShift1 6y ago

Plus things are often over engineered...

qaq 6y ago
Are you suggesting people don't need Hadoop, Cassandra, Spark , Kafka ... etc to run a website with 3 forms and 2Gb of data? How dare you?
- derision 6y ago
  But then it's not big data, it's just a database and that's not investment grade

azinman2 6y ago

Won’t be great for employment numbers....

Shacklz 6y ago
I actually don't think so - to me it seems that the market still has strong demand for software engineers. What I do think however is that we might start to see a shift of talent towards more "mundane, boring" jobs. Less over-engineering apps for fancy startups on VC-lifesupport, more CRUD-apps for SME, big corps, government and whoever else seemingly less attractive than some cash-burning unicorn. And for society, it might be for the better. Too many startups these days seem to be focused on value extraction instead of creation (meetup might be one of the few exceptions).

slg 6y ago

>Maybe the whole current situation will change attitudes back toward lean and mean which always seems to be when tech does it’s best work. If history is any indication, we will learn this lesson, practice if for a little while, forget it, and be retaught it again in 6-12 years.

Apocryphon 6y ago

It's like we never learned anything from the VC excesses of the dot com bubble, other than delaying when you IPO.

0xfffafaCrash 6y ago

The idea that a company on the scale of Meetup could be effectively run by 5 people in a basement strikes me as completely absurd. I've seen similar comments about companies like Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and even Facebook and I'm really in awe of how completely out of touch with the reality of what it takes to run a global business with millions of users and customers people have to be to suggest these things. Do people imagine you can just take the UI, have a few people wire it up to scale in "the cloud" and basically call it a day?

mgoblu3 6y ago
Even as someone working on a really big global app with hundreds of engineers, people also underestimate that although the core of something might not be all that complex, all the auxiliary parts and necessary edge cases add tons of complexity that you have to handle if you want a complete product. You can only get away dodging that for so long.
bko 6y ago
Honest question: what are the issues that a company like meetup faces that would require a large team or significant funding?
- viraptor 6y ago
  Translations, international money handling, local market research / contacts, SEO, marketing/ads/visibility, ... I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
  - umeshunni 6y ago
    Everything you said + content moderation, dealing with policy/harassment etc. Anytime you’re allowing end users to create content on your platform or use your service to interact with other people, you have to deal with all the policy and icky people stuff.

jahaja 6y ago

You guess that you can't pump and dump a company into an IPO with only double-digit number of employees.

tqi 6y ago

What are some examples of consumer companies of this size that run super lean? Meetup had 35M users two years ago, so lets say something in the range of 3M-5M monthly actives for the sake of simplicity.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Enter stage left: Craigslist

jtolmar 6y ago

A lot of the best startup advice is packaged coupled with VC fundraising advice, and if unless you think to question it then it seems like the natural thing to do. This very site was founded by the community that formed around a bunch of startup advice essays Paul Graham wrote to advertise his venture capital business. And in the very low-capital-requirement world of pure tech, VC funding is actually kind of as strange choice. A lot of startups would be much better off as coops.

cactus2093 6y ago

I was just thinking about this recently. SAAS tools have gotten so expensive. For any given tool you use, inevitably the team building it is VC backed and wants to continually expand into more and more tangential areas and be able to afford a higher and higher CAC to grow into a 10 billion dollar business. There's often really no need for it, either the expanded use cases are irrelevant to many customers or it starts to overlap-but-not-quite-fully-replace another tool customers are already using and happy with. Pagerduty is a prime example I have followed for a long time. It used to be so simple and just let you set up recurring rotations and used twilio to alert the current on-call person. You might even be able to set the original product up today with zapier for just a few cents per alert. I don't remember their early pricing, but my memory is it used to be very cheap. Now they're a public company with a huge enterprise sales team and their lowest tier is $29 per user, and there are all kinds of extra features they want to up-sell you on from there that most people don't need. Sure that's not so expensive in the scheme of things, but if there are 20 different little utilities like this you want to use it adds up. (While I'm at it, that reminds me of another of the terrible patterns I see from all of these kinds of companies now, the per-seat pricing model even when the resource you're using doesn't scale that way. Want to set up CI builds in CircleCI? Surely they'll charge us for machine capacity. Well guess what, they also charge $15 per month per seat. You want folks on other teams who use different tools to ever be able to check in on the status of a build? Too bad, buy every one of them their own seat. If someone new ever even accidentally tries to sign in with github and you haven't provisioned a seat for them, CircleCI will actually stop running your builds until an admin goes in to upgrade your plan). Anyway, it feels that there's a massive opportunity for a self-funded team of 5 or 10 people or in some cases maybe even 1 person to build a great lifestyle business that takes on the original focused use case of some of these ubiquitous SAAS platforms, but undercuts the big bloated business they are today on price by a huge amount.