Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

"There are thousands of dumb startups"

This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

View on HN

"Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

I struggle with this all the time

I try to put myself in the shoes of VCs hearing AirBNB, Uber, Twitter and other pitches. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give them money. (and then, I would post on HN saying "How I missed AirBNB. Including email threads with the founders and beating myself up).

This is indeed the premise of VCs but even with that in mind, some startups being funded are just ridiculous.

It's worth remembering that at the time it wasn't "blogging 140 characters at a time" it was "SMS blogging" which is a much easier idea to pitch in that the use case is more obvious (being on the go) and the character limit isn't arbitrary.

Tell you what, hard engineering problems are never not a hit. But nobody cares, because they require so much money and so much hard work... Same with bio-engineering, and whatnot.

No, let's just make yet another app which brings insignificant incremental deveopment to calendar viewing apps.

Be serious.

Twitter is well funded. Whether it's a successful business depends on when you bought in.

If we're talking about the VC's who funded they made out just fine ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com