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Comment by Kye | Hacker News Reader

Your measure of success would make a lot of good companies look like failures.

So what if we measure success by profitability? Neither Pagerduty nor Dropbox are profitable.

I'm not a capitalist. Profitability is helpful under capitalism for survival, but it's a poor measure of anything other than whether one number is higher than another.

YC funds a lot of companies who do cool things that aren't very profitable. I don't know what most of them do, and that's great. So many of them serve niches I haven't even heard of. If they break even making someone's life better, then they're a success.

Imagine a world without Stripe or something like it. The current boom in membership services might not have happened. Even VC-juiced Patreon, which I use, handles payments through Stripe. How many successful companies by your measure glue their business together with companies that got their initial funding and guidance from YC?

So exactly how do you run a business as an ongoing concern if you continuously lose more money than you make?

The answer is get bought by an ad-funded behemoth or a VC-funded behemoth or struggle to get by. I didn't say better measures of success were viable under this system.

There's a reason I'm not a capitalist. Profit as the only measure of success is how we ended up in this hell world. You're welcome to only care about that, but I prefer to imagine and work toward better futures.

So did you give up all worldly goods to live in a monastery and live on the charity of others or do you work for a company that seeks to make money?

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, please don't cross into personal attack.

Those are not the only choices.

Well what “choice” did you make to food on your table?

Many. Sometimes I manage to make interesting stuff that people are also willing to pay for. Those are the good ones.

So you’re providing stuff that people are willing to pay for - ie capitalism.

Sure, no one claimed otherwise.

Just that there are nuances between monastery and money-seeking-only business.

"Profit as the only measure of success is how we ended up in this hell world. You're welcome to only care about that, but I prefer to imagine and work toward better futures."

No, profit is not the cause of hell. Debt is, it's a modern-form of slavery.

When you accept VCs money, the reality (if you play by the rules), is that you agree to give your most precious ressource (time and energy) to pay back your debt.

It may pay off, or may not, but you have to be very aware of your choices.

VC funding is worse than debt if you care about your business. When you borrow money, the lender doesn’t own a stake in your business. You just have to pay them back at their agreed upon terms.

Theoretically you could “buy back” your equity but with the type of returns and want it’s almost impossible. Taking VC money is like taking a payday loan.

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