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LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders
- jagged-chisel 2mo ago> … the fake version and the "strategic partnership" version are separated mostly by vibes, scale, and whether a bank structured it. I have a new business idea …
- Animats 2mo agoIt worked for NVidia.
- kylecazar 2mo agoThe creator of this has a good note on how the Nvidia situation relates, under his diagram of their circular deal: "To be clear: every deal here is legal, publicly announced, and defended by the people in it — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called the structure "nothing inappropriate in principle." Critics compare the pattern to 1990s dot-com vendor financing and warn it can inflate the appearance of demand. As Bloomberg puts it, a circular deal is legally different from a fraudulent "round-trip" — regulators' term for sham trades with no economic substance designed to inflate results. LARP is a joke about the round-trip. This is the legal cousin it rhymes with."
- browski 2mo agoNvidia makes real things, grinds to push computing forward and are coincidentally wrapped up in the latest hype cycle in a big way Software-only startups make nothing but hype and (these days) merely copy-paste existing frameworks and libraries into an AWS account, fill in predefined config parameters, generate zero net new knowledge Studied applied physics and EE in college, been in high tech eng for almost 3 decades and lived through the evolution of software truth still being discovery into streamlined template filling. People need jobs in this political system so whatever but I know a lot about engineering across contexts and where the bleeding edge is and know SaaS startups are rarely engaged in pushing the edge out further. It's a jobs program to validate political memes
- anotherhue 2mo agoI was able to close my first series A after just a few hours of using this. I wish the rate limits were higher though.
- dontfeedthemac 2mo agoyou’re literally scamming VCs lol
- peesem 2mo agooh no!
- deadbabe 2mo agoWhat people miss from these things is that there is economic value being created. For example, if you gift someone a $100 Amazon gift card, but they also gift you a $100 Amazon gift card. Has any gift actually been exchanged? Yes, the sentiment of giving. Or if someone pays you $100 to eat a pile of shit, and then you use the same $100 to pay them to eat a pile of shit, you both have eaten, but the money is in the same place it started. In the end, if you paint a big enough picture, all money flow in an economy is circular anyway.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- apsurd 2mo agoThe moving of money across time is 100% central to money's value. Passing digital money around to cook the books is moving money... fraudulently. So yeah, they're not the same unless you're goaling on the semantic purity of the word "move".
- weego 2mo agoI'm confused how circulating legal tender between 2 parties could be cooking books or fraud. Each party can absolutely claim they made money from the transaction. The fact they lost money in a different transaction is a separate concern.
- thewileyone 2mo agoGross Revenue is sometimes passed off as Revenue in reports, until you examine the fine print.
- Spooky23 2mo agoRather than claim that they passed money around to make money, a nice income statement demonstrates that they made money. Cooking up fake transactions to make an investor think there is business happening is the definition of fraud.
- mjfisher 2mo agoIt says something about the state of the world that I was genuinely uncertain whether this was actually a joke right until the last paragraph. Very well done.
- gardnr 2mo agoI too was nervous until I clicked through and had a read.
- abalashov 2mo agoOkay, that's genuinely funny. Sadly, it might be a little subtle for the folks who need to feel the mockery most.
- nylonstrung 2mo agoIf you go through the most recent YC batches, it's insane how much of their "customer list" is just other companies in the same or recent batches
- meric_ 2mo agoIt's the YC playbook. I guess it works, Corgi for example a "AI" insurance company with like only 5 real engineers and a bunch of growth people. Their main customer is other startups mostly YC. Same with Delve.
- reticulates 2mo agoCorgi is even worse than just circular revenue, their entire insurance business is a house of cards: https://reticulating.substack.com/p/ycombinators-corgi-insurance-a-26 https://reticulating.substack.com/p/ycombinators-corgi-insur...
- mrandish 2mo agoI've been out of the valley (circular) loop for a bit so I'd never heard of Corgi. OMFG...
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- cj 2mo agoTLDR: The insurance market is highly regulated, with measures in place to protect customers if your insurance company becomes insolvent. Corgi does not have those protections, because they've figured out how to offer a product similar to insurance without being regulated like a normal insurance company. Innovation!
- Eridrus 2mo agoThanks for the article, I assume you are the author. I think the main question about Corgi is: are they underpricing risk so severely that they go bust? And honestly, we have no idea. For all we know startups are buying overpriced insurance from Corgi because they have a better brand and are easier to deal with than Berkshire's army of underwriters. Though it's also worth noting that the main reasons startups buy insurance is not because they want insurance, but because enterprise customers demand insurance. Which is to say, it's not out of the realm of possibility that funded startups are not actually that price sensitive, because they just want to get the deal signed and move on. We got our insurance elsewhere because we're a little older, so I have no actual opinion of Corgi, but there's a lot of stuff that enterprise customers demand that is driven by some compliance checklist. Delve took this to an extreme, but directionally, they were providing the service customers wanted, and at least in the insurance market, you can just pay more to paper over your problems rather than addressing the core risks in a way where there is no fraud. We pay for random shit we don't need that delivers no value for enterprise customers to tick boxes, for all I know Corgi fills the same need.
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- opem 2mo agoI was genuienly confused till the pricing and tipping section.
- ant6n 2mo agoWhat I wonder is what LARP stands for. something like “looped/linked annual revenue platform”? (Don’t answer with something about role playing, it’s definitely not that)
- esafak 2mo agohttps://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LARP https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LARP
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- 47thpresident 2mo agoIt is definitely the life-action role playing definition. As in you’re LARPing a successful company with high cash flow. I know it has nothing to do with actual role playing, it’s just the popular way of calling someone a poser on the internet at the moment.
- ant6n 2mo agoIt also turns the joke into a single-entendre, which is no fun at all.
- peesem 2mo agoit does still stand for Live Action Role Plating, but the meaning of the acronym on the internet has been expanded over the past few months to mean anything like "pretending" or "lying".
- 0xnyn 2mo agoYC be like: hold my beer
- kotberg 2mo ago[flagged]
- slj 2mo agoI just valued my buddy at 1.2 Trillion
- moomoo11 2mo agolets all help each other out become billionaires now /s
- desktopentree 2mo agoI had serious concerns as an accountant until I realized how familiar everything sounded.
- jfil 2mo agoI took quite a few accounting courses in University. For every topic we covered, our business school ensured that we wrapped up by examining a case of fraud involving that mechanism. I am grateful that now I know what not to do, and that professional accountants are well versed in all the lates types of fraud so that they can stay away from it.
- mcmcmc 2mo agoThird post in three day, not counting the ones that have been removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852458 The joke is getting tired.
- brazukadev 2mo agoit is the same link so you are complaining about a HN system failure which should have upvoted the first submission.
- chaboud 2mo agoClicks on link. Reads this thinking it's gotta be a joke... continues reading not sure if it's a joke. Relieved to find out it's a joke. I guess that's the joke. Heavies have been playing this "pretend internet money" game off and on for decades. In investment analysis, details matter.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoYeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!
- danny_codes 2mo agoThe excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners. Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach. So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoYeah I know. Them's the breaks, right? How big of a chance do you think those books will be about a gentle and kind but supremely powerful entity guiding the world? Of course it would be best if the book only appears to be based on that premise, and while the entity is quite powerful, it is being supported by a cabal of individuals who claim they are merely its caretakers but actually derive extraordinary social power by controlling it, and it is revealed that in other lands there are other such entities, and what appeared to be an general peace is actually an illusion created by this powerful group of people using their entity, that they are engaged in near constant warfare, directly or indirectly, with other entities; but, even they believe so deeply that what they are doing is right that they think they are only the entity's caretakers, and that there are only wars because other people want to use their entity for personal gain! Who knows, your friend might be very clever.
- bradyriddle 2mo ago[dead]
- rarisma 2mo agoIts a simple spell but quite unbreakable
- sherlock-holmes 2mo agoi was gonna crash out before i read this and realized that it's a joke lol > Before LARP, growth was constrained by whether customers actually paid us. That's no longer a bottleneck we think about
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoDo people actually believe that the revenue for these companies is "fake"? Do they think financial analysts don't have anything but revenue to look at to determine the substance of their growth?
- KasianFranks 2mo agoI'll bite. Can you send us 1% back?
- virajk_31 2mo agoA sent 10K to B, B sent 10K to A, where is 10K coming from? and if it's a circle then how would you report higher revenue..
- juliangmp 2mo agoThat's the neat part: the money doesn't have to exist at all. And once you go through enough hops and convince the world that this thing which your company happens to be pioneering will forever change the world and everyone will use it the money circle isn't even relevant because the entire goal was to make your stock prices skyrocket and now you're valued at ridiculous levels! Just make sure to get out of it all before any Investor actually wants to see real profit being made.
- jonah 2mo agoYou get more money in, so you have higher revenue. Your spending also increases by an equal amount, so your profit is unchanged.
- bryanrasmussen 2mo agoThis reminds me a lot of good old Bonneville Pacific Corps model for getting rich, which worked for years and did make them rich until they tried to merge with one of those naturally suspicious and rule following German firms https://www.utb.uscourts.gov/sites/utb/files/case_opinion/386.pdf https://www.utb.uscourts.gov/sites/utb/files/case_opinion/38...
- artemonster 2mo agoCall us/ we won't pick up love the humor
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- mkw5053 2mo agoWhat is this style/design called? I keep seeing it pop up more and more (and have to assume it's a side effect of vibe coding).
- georgel 2mo agoClaude Design outputs like this.
- stronglikedan 2mo agoI don't know, but I find it to be one of the most legible color schemes since Solarized light mode, so I'd be happy if everyone used it.
- tangenter 2mo ago[flagged]
- kordlessagain 2mo ago[flagged]
- tangenter 2mo agoUpvoted. The secret origin story of Kord as he feels belittled by an anonymous online commenter, one of a handful who flagged his submission to HN. A Great War is about to waged on the internet. Absolute cinema is in our grasp, we must be alive to witness it.
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- bluegatty 2mo agoNvidia / OAI etc. are selling each other product which have a fair market value. They're not moving money around with 'no services rendered'. It does however mean that the situation is 'highly leveraged' - and therefor risk is more concentrated, and, they do disclose. Nominally there's nothing wrong with investing in one's own supply chain. It makes a lot of sense for a value chain player with huge cash position and therefore a lot of power to take a % ownership of a buyer. Consider for a moment - what if Nvida acquired OpenAI? They would be two divisions in the same company. Would anyone consider it wrong for surpluses from one to be invested in the other? No. The moment it's 'managerial accounting' instead of 'balance sheet accounting' - nobody would care. Imagine Google or AWS acquired Nvidia - maybe in 2017 so it would seem more realistic in terms of price - would any of this seem financially dubious? No. Of course - those mega mergers would be bad for competition, but that's a separate question. There's nothing inherently wrong going on here, as long as it's on the books and people understand the inherent structural risk of coupling etc..
- didntknowyou 2mo agoi thought it was a prank website but then realise this was real
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- zackmorris 2mo agoIt's interesting that this is a parody, but that no real-world alternatives exist. Some come close, ranked from lowest to highest gatekeeping: - https://www.gofundme.com/ https://www.gofundme.com/ (personal / charitable) - https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/ (ongoing creator subscriptions) - https://www.indiegogo.com/ https://www.indiegogo.com/ (creative / tech / flexible rewards) - https://www.kickstarter.com/ https://www.kickstarter.com/ (creative / rewards) - https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/ (scientific research) - https://gamefound.com/ https://gamefound.com/ (tabletop games) - https://www.crowdsupply.com/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/ (hardware / tech) - https://www.kiva.org/ https://www.kiva.org/ (micro-loans / social impact) - https://wefunder.com/ https://wefunder.com/ (startup equity) - https://www.startengine.com/ https://www.startengine.com/ (startup equity) - https://republic.com/ https://republic.com/ (startup equity) - https://www.prosper.com/ https://www.prosper.com/ (loan consolidation) Note how some like kickstarter.com and prosper.com should have been at the top, but sold out or lost their way to cater more to funders than entrepreneurs. The same problem happened with freelancing, where developers are force to apply to low-paying gigs so many times that it's perhaps no longer lucrative: - https://gun.io/ https://gun.io/ (premium developer-first matchmaking) - https://www.codeable.io/ https://www.codeable.io/ (niche / premium wordpress development) - https://lemon.io/ https://lemon.io/ (vetted startup matching) - https://www.toptal.com/ https://www.toptal.com/ (premium / 3% elite tech network) - https://arc.dev/ https://arc.dev/ (remote technical role matchmaking) - https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ (high-quality remote tech job board) - https://www.turing.com/ https://www.turing.com/ (ai-driven technical matchmaking) - https://contra.com/ https://contra.com/ (commission-free portfolio network) - https://www.upwork.com/ https://www.upwork.com/ (open marketplace formed from elance & odesk) - https://www.fiverr.com/ https://www.fiverr.com/ (productized gigs / digital storefront model) - https://www.freelancer.com/ https://www.freelancer.com/ (open bidding marketplace) - https://www.guru.com/ https://www.guru.com/ (legacy bidding marketplace ) I feel that both of these trends have combined to create the k-shaped economy of haves and have-nots that we have today. Imagine if a team of internet lottery winners formed an investment alliance (perhaps using AI) to compete directly with venture capital firms like Y Combinator, outside of the schmoozing and board micromanagement that come with having to network. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but that's why the startup ecosystem is so uninspired today vs its peak from 1995-1999, before the 2000 Dot Bomb which returned us to gatekeeping by the wealthy and powerful. In the early years, the academic/conceptually-correct solution tended to be the right one. Whereas today, winner-take-all effects and survivorship bias dominate, so that capital (unearned income) grows exponentially while wages (earned income) flatline or regress. Which results in high underemployment rates when workers tread water having to choose between saving 10% of their income to start a business or make rent. I'm having trouble finding statistics for it, but it tends to be about double the unemployment rate, hovering around 10-20%: https://www.newgeography.com/content/004016-underemployment-america https://www.newgeography.com/content/004016-underemployment-... Some demographics (like recent college graduates) are approaching 50% underemployment: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:underemployment https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... In other words, as many as half of the best and brightest minds in the US are trapped in dead-end or (multiple) part-time jobs, if they're lucky enough to have a job. Which seems odd at a time when there are so many trillions of dollars of investment capital with nowhere to go that they pump up the stock market's biggest companies instead of investing in the millions of people struggling to afford the endlessly increasing cost of living.
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