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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

> But why Lambda School had to grow that much that fast?

Isn't that obvious? They have investors. It's precisely what Joel writes about in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...

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I know the incentives are there to have exponential Silicon Valley hyper growth. But there are also incentives to be a company that still exists and it is big 20 years from now. And there are ethical decisions that could be made despite of the incentives.

Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way.

Edit: thanks for the link, great article. ”Land grab” is a great term for what I currently think about Lambda School. Except the “land” is people’s life and hopes.

> Even being a YC company, I believe it didn’t have to be that way.

YC is a startup incubator. A startup, as defined by YC's founder, is a company that grows fast.

Trying to convince anyone in SV that this is extremely dumb or dangerous or unethical is a waste of time.

A lot of these companies are in the “the only reason it’s a good price is we are burning VC money” and “the only reason we have VC money is our promise to grow” zone. Customers can enjoy watching the slow motion train crash.

That's why I consider startups a Faustian bargain. You get easy access to capital, in exchange for your company's soul. And the devil always comes to collect. The problems start where this deal causes collateral damage on the market - harming customers directly, or indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing.

> indirectly by preventing competitors who aren't looking for an exit from existing.

This is huge, and definitely hurts in the short term, but could it actually be good in the long term? Let's say the break-even price for Service A is $x/mo/user. Nobody really knows the technical problems underlying A, but startups #1-3 get venture funding and start offering Service A for .75x, for a couple years each, burning a few million in some dentist's or VC's capital each and build a huge staff to figure out the tech. Eventually one of the companies gets acquihired and two of them fail.

Bootstrapped Startup #4 opens shop, offers A to 1.15x, and hires engineers from startups 2 and 3 who know the tech inside and out. Consumers get a great product.

And this in capitalism is known as "efficiency".

I worry that those startups #1-3 burn a good chunk of their money on customer acquisition, not on solving technological problems (though scale creates its own problems too). That money would be unnecessarily wasted. I also doubt a huge staff is needed to figure out the tech part.

But I understand your point: startups can be viewed as economy's distributed R&D. Speculative investment makes a lot of sense - it could be that without startups #1-3, #4 wouldn't exist because it couldn't afford the risk of developing an innovative product. But my main gripe is how VC-backed startups repay the investment - they're being pressured into user-hostile and sometimes antisocial business models. It's so common that these business model became accepted as standard these days! So perhaps a way forward isn't to reduce venture funding, but curtail the socially destructive business models directly.

Imo, bootstrapped startups can only exist feasibly in the B2B space. And definitely not in the B2C space. Would Uber have succeeded if it were bootstrapped (with higher pricing), or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?

> or would it have spawned enough copycats during its slow growth phase who would soon make it infeasible to scale up and hire the kind of engineers that a venture like ridesharing would need?

Would that be a problem? At least from the point of view of a customer, I don't want a single megacorp owning the market (and let's cut the marketing BS: Uber is not a startup, and hasn't been for a while; it's a multinational corporation). More "copycats" is usually better, as they compete (until they start racing to the bottom, but that's another issue entirely).

I was talking about Uber circa 2009. Were it bootstrapped, we would have seen 5-6 loss making entities competing against each other by 2014 - and Uber wouldn't have likely expanded outside the US.

I understand. But I don't consider Uber's success a good thing - it was a ruthless company that cornered the market through illegal and antisocial behavior, and unfortunately set a path for other startups to follow. I believe we'd be better off if Uber died very early, and allowed one of their above-board competitors to disrupt the taxi space.

As David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp said, paraphrasing: "every time you take someone's [VC] money, you get a new boss."

The sad truth is, there probably isn’t a tradeoff here. ITT Tech survived and grew for almost half a century while offering many students a worse experience at a higher price than the worst I’ve ever seen Lambda School accused of.

interestingly, from joel "With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong." I remember AIM well (used AOL until they became TalkTalk), but I also remember using MSN messenger even more and being much more ubiquitous, granted that could have been generational (I wasn't a teenager until the mid-naughties). Ultimately it seems MSN did win out.

It's funny that you say that, because I grew up in the same time frame (graduated high school in 2006) and I don't think I ever touched MSN Messenger. Where I was, it was AIM all the way.

So perhaps less generational, more just the network effects that existed on the ground.

I remember the times where Yahoo! Messenger and MSN/Windows Live Messenger could chat each other. Those were the days.

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