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Comment by OtherShrezzing | Hacker News Reader

>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code

I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the guy with all the money and none of the ideas, so he's a credible fist-hand source.

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If you define good idea to be limited to SaaS, then sure you'll reach saturation pretty soon. But, say, anything that involves hardware could definitely benefit from a little more funding.

Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.

I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view.

There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas.

The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ecosystem that throws capital at ideas of dubious utility for saturated markets, while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.

> while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.

I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.

Investors generally don't care about the actual utility of what gets built. They want a high return on investment.

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