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30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons

30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons online of what to do and not do. None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more. Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful" LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.

matherial 22d ago
> 30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. What's a "startup"? For the most part, you're just building a small business. You deal with local bureaucracies, learn about accounting, hire first employees, struggle to find customers. People have been doing this for ages without VCs. And 99% of startups never progress past that stage. The only thing that VC funding changes is that it lets you grow faster than justified. This can turn you into the next Google, but most often, it puts you on a completely unsustainable path where you only have two outs: writing the project off or offloading it to a FOMO buyer for more than it's worth. The VC ecosystem is exceedingly good at that second part.

matherial 22d ago

> 30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. What's a "startup"? For the most part, you're just building a small business. You deal with local bureaucracies, learn about accounting, hire first employees, struggle to find customers. People have been doing this for ages without VCs. And 99% of startups never progress past that stage. The only thing that VC funding changes is that it lets you grow faster than justified. This can turn you into the next Google, but most often, it puts you on a completely unsustainable path where you only have two outs: writing the project off or offloading it to a FOMO buyer for more than it's worth. The VC ecosystem is exceedingly good at that second part.