Title should be: I don't want to take VC money and I don't think you do either

I do find it interesting that in spite of the fact that so few companies will ever accept VC money or go public, this model is viewed by many as the dominant or only way to start a tech business. This is in spite of the fact that Technology businesses may very well have the lowest capital requirements of any type of company in history.

It was the same way in the 80s with finance. Even though most finance workers were (and are) accountants working boring 9-to-5 corporate jobs, everyone assumed that anyone in finance worked on Wall Street and snorted coke off of strippers in NYC nightclubs every weekend.

Its talked about a lot because the VCs are out there beating a drum, as they should. Drawing a crowd. Hopefully an interesting one.

Once you get a crowd, everyone starts doing what the people around them do. Its natural. It takes some time and experience to figure out whether you need to be there or not.

Yah my feelings about running a startup are completely different for bootstrapped/hacked up companies (I think that's the term?)

The downsides are still there it takes the same level of commitment, dedication, and obsessive effort to bootstrap.

It has taken me 5 years to bootstrap a niche b2b saas to $1m ARR. It is both awesome and terrible.

It doesn't have to be stressful or full-commitment. I'm cool with $50k ARR.

I'm not even sure revenue is that good of a signal of the work put in. Didn't the Basecamp guys start off on just 10 hours a week inbetween their day job.

By day job do you mean running 37signals the new media design firm at the dawn of the web?

I wouldn’t really isolate the “day job” part here, it was sort of the quintessential dogfood SaaS.

That's an amazing achievement to have reached that milestone!

I am this close to changing it, this is very good

I like how according to Silicon Valley, a "Founder" is a person that has borrowed capital from VCs. I live in Silicon Valley and there are more businesses here that are not backed by VCs than otherwise. Tens of thousands of small businesses who work as hard as the top dogs sucking up to VCs, yet they're just businesses with owners, not "Startups" with "Founders". Some people still call Dropbox, Airbnb and Uber as "Startups". I am a little annoyed by this just like I am annoyed by buzzwords of today - AI, crypto (bonus points if you throw in the term - supply-chain), and of course, the new kid on the block - "Quantum".

Do you guys not see this and introspect once in a while?

I hear this come up so much and it's just trite.

I don't think anybody in Silicon Valley would say the _definition_ of a Founder is someone who takes VC money.

All companies require capital to operate. All capital has a cost. In many high growth companies, the amount of time it takes to build a product and go to market has a significant effect of how much market share that company can acquire. Selling equity or taking on debt is how many companies can reduce that time and acquire more market share.

It just happens to be that the companies Silicon Valley is most interested in are companies that have to raise capital this way, with very very few exceptions.

Now more than ever, VCs will happily tell a a founder "your business is not a business that fits with the VC model well, don't raise VC money." The VCs who say that do not think the people they are are saying that to "aren't founders" - their business just doesn't need VC investment.

A "Founder" is someone who creates their own company with or without VC money. If VC money was a pre requisite then Jeff Bezos wont be a founder.

It's kind of fishy this is the only comment OP responded to. And OP's other most recent comment was on a basecamp thread

You really don’t know DHH or BaseCamp. I can guarantee you that he has enough of a reach and platform not to engage in shady guerrilla marketing

Isn't the issue just drivers?

I like how that comment has more responses than the OP

I only read the abstract (first paragraph), so maybe I'm way off base here. I'm about to go to bed and want to bang this out:

I think it's three pieces that need to come together. The source, the system it's running on, and the user. You don't necessarily need all 3

1. If you only have the user and the source but not the system then you're screwed. I could print out the entire FreeBSD source and docs, go back in time to 1820 and it would be pretty much useless since I need a C compiler and a million transistors, power supply and a bunch of other stuff. Obviously this is an extreme example, since most of the time you'd just have a slightly incomplete system (e.g. crappy build scripts but you know they built it on a unix system 2 years ago) so it's usually workable

2. If it's the user and the system then that's basically proprietary software. You can reverse engineer the source. Tedious but doable

3. If it's the source and the system, then you might be able to get a new user study both and understand everything again. Depends on the complexity of the source/system and the docs.

I think of it as an organism, like it can be damaged and heal itself. There is redundancy between these 3 axes. Depending the circumstances, you can heal it or it might be permanently damaged

I'm glad it's Lua since it gives me a leg up over all the other companies with devs who don't want to learn a new language. OpenResty is slept on so hard.

Not really.

why

The nice thing about RSS is that it's never gonna die

This is the future. If you're doing iOS or Android dev professionally, your days are numbered.

I remember when 2004 was the year of the Linux desktop.

I remember Neo 1973 and FreeRunner..

"Even tho it's not ready for daily driving, I think it will be in a few months" sounds like something I've heard before. Not gonna hold my breath.

I can see Linux on the smartphone becoming about as popular als Linux on desktop. Appreciated and used by relatively few but enthusiastic people.

Think longer. Apple Inc. was founded 44 years ago. They were a PC company until 11 years ago. Can we be confident that in 2031 the libre phone will have gained no market share to the iPhone? What about in 2064?

If the UX does not vastly improve even beyond what is currently good by Linux standards I don’t see a reason for most people to switch.

It might not be the thing driving people to switch, but I'd be hesitant to claim that Desktop Linux is any worse than the competition. Like, I don't have the exposure to comment on Apple's products, but Windows is no better than XFCE, GNOME, MATE, or KDE these days, Android is a toy, and ChromeOS isn't better. Like... I know this is weak praise; Windows versions after 7 got worse as they fragmented (have they re-merged the control panels yet?), Android was born a mobile OS, and ChromeOS was always meant to be cut-down, but the result is that the playing field is level.

I don't know who the CEO of JP Morgan is, but I imagine he might be one of the few who would pull out a Pinephone with a his own custom software stack with encryption for all his communications and perhaps some other special tools.

You're imagining wrong

What a wonderful argument. Really shows your intellect.