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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

People who are in a startup-centric forum shouldn't complain on inequality i believe. What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future.

We are all riding a horse we know won't be around for much longer. Most startups exploit the shiny object factor, gullibility, poor education and plain stupidity of people who shouldn't have had any money to buy stuff in the first place - and they soon will not have - but above all they exploit the pyramid of debt as trillions upon trillions of valuations and exits that the founders cash out are the printed money that doesn't really exist. When it will be time to pay it back, it's better to be as far as possible...

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"What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future."

I've worked for two startups. Both really did want to change the world in good ways. Yes, we wanted to get rich (in neither case were we exactly successful, although they weren't failures in that regard either), but "milking future generations for cash" didn't come into it at all. Making something people wanted did.

There are plenty of scammers in the startup space, but that is hardly the definition.

It doesn't matter. The yardstick is: if a business is about profits, it's usually OK. If it's about valuation and exits - and all startups are - it's a scam: because why is it looking for those? Because they are absurdly inflated. Where is that money coming from? It's printed! That money is debt. It will be paid by future generation of Americans - well ofc it won't, the payment will come simply in form of the system crashing down, voiding almost all values of everything, including stocks, real estate, retirement money, and debt too... When it happens it's best of all to be as far away as possible - because all American life is built around that inflated money and with it gone, bottom will fall out of the good old U.S.

Sounds like your problem is with capitalism generally, along with a heaping dose of modern economics, not startups specifically.

Well, it's the monetary stimulus going off scale. The amount of money being printed by the Fed is ridiculous, and it causes all these bubbles - and a lot of people think that they sit on a lot of money and plan their retirements on spending it. Not going to happen because this money - like home and stock values - doesn't exist, it exists on paper only as long as not enough people are trying to spend it.

System would be balanced if seeking profits and seeking exits was similarly valued and respected, if VCs would invest money looking for stream of dividends as much as exit/IPO of the company... But that would take average P/E about 5..8, not 25-30 it is. Till then, and as long as "revenue business" is a derogatory term, we can know that startups are little but a generational Ponzi scheme.

Not really. It's a mixture here.

Some startups take cash and turn it into useful things that benefit future generations. Things like medical breakthroughs for example.

Without that cash, those useful things will not be created, they will just live in someone's head as an unfulfilled dream.

Some use it to make things that make people happy, like games. Don't discount the benefit to future generations of having things that make life happier.

And don't discount the goodness of people being able to work on their dreams, either. It's not just rich people that get to play the startup work-on-my-dream game. Poorer people do as well, admittedly with less chances at it, but it happens often enough to count.

Some even have benefitting others, the less well off, be an explicit goal of their startup. Heck, some even invest their time and money into non-profits for such benefit to others. (I did that.)

And some startups are bootstrapped by people's own personal money that they earned doing a regular job. Imagine that.

Any startup that looks for valuation/exit more than for profits, is of that sort because absurdly high valuations/ratios are funded by printed money which is basically, robbing of future generations.

Eh, I for one hope rich people feel bad enough about inequality to start doing something about it. If "complain[ing] on inequality" gets them there, go for it!

I don't know whether you're being sarcastic, but if that's your genuine attitude towards your own vocation I wish you all the success you feel you deserve.

I am just trying to stay mentally healthy by lying to myself as little as i can.

Also, i know that the only alternative is the Communism, and i was born in the Soviet Union and old enough to remember a lot of it, and that's enough to prefer the current system.

Pretty much. When I hear someone call their project a "startup" instead of a "business" I assume they're trying to scam the world.

There's a few reasons, among them to attract certain kinds of investors, and certain types of potential co-workers, and to mix with whichever crowd the "startup action" is happening in.

If you want people to think of David to the incumbent Goliaths, something with a mission to introduce something new and breakthrough to the world, a conduit for the wild dreams of youth to come alive, call it a startup.

If you want people to think stodgy, established, nice stable place to work and pay your mortgage off for 30 years, but no changing the world, call it a business.

Like any branding, that will affect who approaches you and what opportunities you end up with.

That's fair, and I get the branding distinction. Maybe I just think it's played out and there needs some new way to communicate that. When I someone emails me about working at a startup I think "No, I don't want to humor your get rich quick scheme by working for lottery tickets. Nor do I want to work for organized crime like Uber, or commit fraud like Theranos, or destroy civilization itself like Facebook." To me the word communicates a kind of tech savvy used car salesman vibe. I understand that there are Enrons and cigarette companies, so "businesses" aren't immune to this either. Maybe I'm just skeptical of human endeavor.

And most startups who claim to want to “take on Goliath” really want to get acquired by Goliath. Whether they want it or not though, that’s the expected exit of their investors.

Just look at YC. Only two YC backed companies have ever gone public - DropBox and PagerDuty.

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