Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

> What's changed?

Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.

But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.

I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.

PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.

I'd say starting a company to make something people want in order to sell it for money is still relevant. It's just that you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years, slowly growing the business and balancing the risks and opportunities along the way. You won't be looking for an "exit" because you want to take care of the company you built. That's a very different story from whatever vibe it is that startups acquired after the dotcom boom, i.e. find something that hasn't been done before, scales quickly, and sell the company after a few years for 1000x, and then something.

That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in.

Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.

IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia.

Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.

For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.

I think several factors have changed over time, which have made the startup landscape—and for us mere mortals who dream about it—less exciting:

- Massive consolidation in tech: Large tech companies can easily acquire and neutralize potential competitors by offering founders a few million dollars, leading to fewer truly groundbreaking success stories.

- The evolving role of accelerators and VCs: They’ve turned startups into something akin to product management roles within their own agendas. Whether it’s cloud, AI, or the next big trend, founders often end up building what investors want rather than pursuing their own unique visions.

- A lack of truly groundbreaking ideas: We don’t see as many revolutionary concepts anymore—the kind that once gave birth to companies like Google or Amazon. This is likely tied to the investor-driven focus mentioned above.

- A shift in cultural expectations: Perhaps we—or at least the HN audience—are becoming more like Europe, with an increasing expectation that governments will take care of us, whether through healthcare or other social services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shift the mindset around risk and entrepreneurship.

Pretend all you want but interest rates make a ton of difference. If you can make a safe, compounded, perhaps leveraged 5% from treasuries the financial bar that a successful startup has to pass is so much higher

Here are a few anecdotes from the U.S. that can hopefully add substance to this conversation:

1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself.

2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what AI will likely disrupt in the next few years. So, think about solving problems in the physical world.

3) Many startups create a pool of equity at around 10-15% of total shares for awarding to key employees. If your startup doesn't have this, then that is a red flag.

4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution?

5) startups are still thriving at universities that support entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.

6) financial stability of startups, especially technical startups, is greatly affected by non-dilutive grants and contracts, e.g. SBIR awards. Investors look for this.

On the last point:

"The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find."

It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.

Point 5: even if your startup exits successfully, the math of exits are brutal for employees (even early ones).

Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios.

Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.

I believe the main change is just that Hacker News went from being a very specific subset of the population to becoming much more mainstream. Ten years ago it was, at least in my opinion, mostly early adopters of internet technology and in general people who had enough funds that they could fail without being devastated. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.

Concerning

> 4. The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

I disagree: In my feeling truly innovative opportunities are still rather easy to find.

I feel what rather changed is that with VC becoming big and mainstream, investors have become more risk-averse in investing into innovative ideas (that they don't really understand). Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.

Most engineers figured out that the options/stocks of startups are worthless.

I think this is the normal trajectory of online forum. The initial cohort was positive and deeply invested into the topic. Over time, this initial cohort gets older and start to have life, slowly being replaced by new people. As long new people share initial ideas and archetype, it can continue to work well.

For HN case, initial cohort either become too busy with life and success and left forum or become jaded and skeptical about startups by experiencing it by themselves. The second group is still very active here, driving a lot of sentiment in discussion. HN also changed audience to be more general techy forum that startup forum. There are more people that want to discuss politics instead of technology (see deepseek, UK hardware talent to AMA with Peter Roberts). Any post about hiring is full of people whining about leetscode. Posts about process are full of agile haters. Even product lunches are full of open-source zealots, discussion of unrelated stuff like rust or useless feedback about website working slowing on 10 years old android phone with JS disabled. There is very little content for aspiring founders.

Finally, there is value in HN for discovery, just not for startup. You can learn more about startup/VC from Y Combinator YouTube channel, Saastr or even Harry Stebbings podcast.

1 and 2 are right, 3 and 4 are dead wrong. There are massive opportunities out there and it isn't a problem focusing on hypergrowth and exits. It is however a problem that even when these massive growth and exits do happen the payout is usually not worth it for all but the founders and VCs.

If you stay too long and the company does grow, but your salary doesn't keep up, and you decide to leave you now have to either abandon your options or buy them and pay taxes on an overinflated FMV (if I can't sell them then the FMV is 0 to me). You are now left with options that are, at best, worthless for a long time or most likely worthless forever. Meanwhile founders have gotten money from internal raises to keep them going and have some ability to make sure their shares have value when an exit happens. Staying means you watch year after year as your options continue to not be worth anything and your share of the company continues to be cut as rounds of funding happen all the while watching as people at a FANG are making 50% more than you.

The only strategy that has a chance at any value is leaving early and leaving often or coming in very late to have a real salary and a chance at a minor boost on your options when an exit happens. If you are an early employee (20 or less, and your options are valued at ~0.10 or less) AND you think there is some chance the company will 'make it' then buy a few k of your options as soon as they vest and leave after 1-1.5 years to go to the next place. This avoids taxes on worthless options and gives you some shot at maybe having one give you some value back. If you are any later than that then don't buy your options and make sure you get a salary that is competitive and still leave after 2-3 years if the company hasn't made it. The options are probably going to be worthless but now you are using them to grow in ability and salary.

Options as compensation is a lie and that is the core problem.

As an ex-engineer in I relate very much with :

> 3. The VC model's limitations have become apparent. The focus on hypergrowth and exits has left many founders [[engineers]] feeling trapped between authentic business building and investor [[founders]] expectations.

Damn me! I’ve be naive to trust the (marketing) promise of the last startup I worked for, as an authentic promise from the founders. A few weeks into and I understood the real goal was to grow and get market shares, whatever the means. I felt betrayed but stayed because I liked my peer and the day to day job, and economic insecurity feeling.

Fast forward 2 years: burnout and quit.

Probably some of the 3 founders did kind of trust in the marketing promise at first and after so many speechs and work they confirmed it via some IKEA effect and confirmation bias [0]. But I felt we were actually building fancy CRUDs (forbidden idea there!) not disturbing anything at all.

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Startups have been on average a shit deal for a long time. I liken it to writing a book - best not to do it unless there is a book inside of you and you'll die if you don't get it out.

I worked in Big Tech before doing consulting at some startups and it appeared to me that startups were often these cultish tribes where the willingness to accept a small percentage of equity was a strong signal that the employee really did believe the future of the company. They don't really want people around with realistic expectations as it'll hurt moral and the illusion that they have to keep going as they raise for subsequent rounds.

I value my own business for freedom, not money.

You don’t have to build a unicorn.

Business has to be sustainable; profit has to be higher than expenses.

For me, I think one of the biggest issue is how incredibly boring the startup landscape has become. Who here is seriously passionate about doing SaaS #9001 which will contain a chatgpt wrapper and yet another series of buzzword to attract VC funding instead of actual users?

There's a ton of big, real problems with our world at the moment, and I don't see the startup scene attacking any of those.

FWIW on HN circa 2012 when I joined, there were people I thought were biz heroes who posted here and that made the place feel smaller, and that dynamic is gone I think. I’m not sure it can be manufactured again either, in the age of personal brands

Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?

While these are all valid, I'm surprised it doesn't include "it's possible Hacker News userbase demographics have shifted over the past 12 years" as an additional contributing factor.

I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory

Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out.

As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-millions being handed out turned out to be legends. Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.

The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.

> the financial argument for startups becomes harder to justify.

Given the failure rate I think it's always been hard to justify for the vast majority of people.

> The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

I sort of disagree with this. While clearly the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked, I still see a ton of good ideas! This might come off as rude, but if you’re the type of person who follows the standard track of graduate with a cs degree then work at big tech for 5 years with your main hobby being socializing or working out, then yeah good ideas will hard to come up with. For those of us interested in tech but with highly non-linear career paths, startup ideas basically fall out of the sky.

I see this a lot in the local startup community too. There's a lot of "ecosystem" feeders who survive on the supply of newbies, but the old experienced founders have mostly either exited and retired, want nothing to do with the startup scene any more, or have just given up and got a job.

The buzz from 10-15 years ago just isn't there any more.

I think more people are realizing that the stories of startup success in 2013 were heavy on survivorship bias, and that over the past decade people have become aware of just how predatory and unequal the VC model is.

New founders have less wool over their eyes, and increasingly run the numbers and say, "wait a second, that's the expected success rate? That's the pressure I'll have to grow grow grow? Those are the terms? Nah, I can work 40 somewhere, get paid more, and put in fewer hours."

We've stopped romanticizing killing oneself for the hustle too.

It seems like there's an expectation of having to get investment as quickly as possible for your company in order for it be "worth doing", which feels counter-intuitive. It sucks that this is the first thought and must prevent a lot of good stuff ever getting started. At least in the UK, a 300k salary for a senior developer is not plausible for most people. But the idea of growing a something slowly, without investment and reaching that sort of income definitely seems more likely. I guess it's all different circumstances!

All of the arguments presented in this were equally true in 2013 as they are in 2025 and there are many more dimensions than you are taking into consideration. For instance, the demographics of HN users could have changed, or the economic climate is cyclically more defensive and 'risk off', which is well known. I suspect this is more related to economic cycles than a cultural paradigm shift and would suggest the author to think more deeply than forming vague generalizations around some HN comments of anonymous users.

You have to be crazy to start a startup, and I mean this in a good way.

I'm currently working on a startup, completely bootstrapped and taking no VC funds. I know what my odds are and I know that the company will most likely fail, but I still do it. That's what makes startup founders "crazy", because you have to realize how low your odds are and at the same time say "fuck it" and keep going.

IMO there will always be startup founders because there will always be folks that want to scratch that itch.

Is it also that many of HN's audience have gotten older and tried these things?

I'm currently working on building my own startup in the billing industry which has a massive barrier to entry just on functionality and then marketing spend and whatnot. If I was in my 20s all this work wouldn't be that much of a big deal. In my 30s it's rougher. And in 40s it would be even rougher.

That's not to mention other issues like funding becoming harder to get.

Obvious addition:

5. 1 != 6

I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?

If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of those industries?

To be fair, who uses and comments on HN could have changed. HN cam be a great place but just as Wall Street isn't The Economy, HN isn't the whole of startup culture.

Interesting to read. Worth pondering. But with limits / caveats.

All that said, The Startup Industrial Complex is real. Plenty are being sucked in and spit out. That's going to impact Hearts & Minds, and comments shared.

> The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

This is only true if you're prioritizing novelty, but a gift has been given to new startups/founders: most of the once-innovative companies have either disappeared or have plateaued and are trapped in stagnation/corporate muck.

Nearly all of the startups/companies I used to adore have embraced some version of Fortune 500 mediocrity.

Now, I think the "innovation" is taking ideas that already exist and dialing them back to what they were before all of the money, press, and massive headcounts. Products designed for the user, not for the investor or social status.

I always come back to this quote by John D. Rockefeller (which I think is dead-on): "the secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."

Just look for the things that are common but have a lackluster experience. There's an overwhelming amount of products fitting that category nowadays.

Innovation doesn't have to mean something "new." For example, Linear's [1] big innovation was taking issue tracking and giving it a polished UI/UX. And guess what? People love it/are buying it.

[1] https://linear.app

Starting a startup is about long-term goals. If feedback (positive or negative) can affect this journey, then this is a trace of the status quo and trying to please people, which is against the core of starting a startup.

The only validation a startup should seek is paying customers or revenue. Everything else is a vanity metric.

What HN comments say is irrelevant, whether positive or negative.

It's largely a measure of risk & reward for your time in 20s-30s. What would you rather as a bright, intelligent, driven person? Put your heart and soul into a high risk but genuinely interesting problem or get paid well to work on someone else's reasonably interesting problem.

I personally had a startup, it was a consultancy business, we got to 5 employees and I learnt a lot. It was very low risk, $0 in VC and bootstrapped from an employee stock benefit of $20k. I focussed on me working just like my employees. I had fun doing it, paid myself well, learnt a lot. I am now financially stable, no debt and own a house outright. That was always enough for my dreams.

I think before jumping in two feet first, lower your life risk. Aim for your 40s to be your own, where you can travel and live free.

I don't think this is so much a "shift in culture" more than a generation getting older. Most Millennials are in their 30s now.

I shouldn't be speaking for you guys because I'm genZ... but it's probably to do with the new responsibilities and the increased risk aversion that comes with them.

A lot of the comments here boil down to "FAANG" is a better deal. But lots of people literally want FAANG to go extinct and won't work for them. Which means you work where?

Startup pay usually beats what random business pay for SWE work.

Probably there's some kind of third track, but it's less obvious to me.

My impression is that the disillusionment with startups has led to m a gradual shift towards small self sufficient software businesses. Some folks that would have previously started a VC backed startup for casual software ideas now just keep the scale down and supplement their income on the side.

I had one product that took off, made more money than at any of my previous (big-tech) jobs, and I thought the tales were true. If you work hard enough, catch a lucky wave and have the skills to ride it, you're free.

The product peaked, and then very quickly dropped to zero in about two years, while I tried everything to prevent going out of business.

Back at the bottom, a year or two of aimless wandering, I figured, well, I've seen the light, I know how this dance needs to be danced, I can dance it one more time.

I've since had half a dozen attempts not even produce a handful of accounts (or in the better cases, paid accounts), and it's simply not sustainable.

I was finally getting to a point where I felt ready to give up last year, and decided to try one last time or get back into a regular job. The problem being, "getting back" now means that I am 20 years older and more than likely _not a great fit_ for many of the roles out there.

So, for now, I am once again knuckle-deep in a new product, about to have a first customer this week (if they sign up) and some light on the horizon.

Yet, even if I manage to surpass all the possible stretch-goals on growth I have set this year, it will still pay considerably less than minimum wage, and that's if everything (and more) works out within this and the next year or so. On occasional consulting gigs I charge $$$, and I don't even dare to compare that to what these Saas/products bring in, is just ... sad. And I hear someone clacking on their keyboard already, responding...

The usual reaction to a post like mine will and used to be: well, you've got the wrong product, audience, or both. But all I want to say after doing this for 20 years now, is: that's the default. If you're not starting from a large-enough platform, your only way to success is to be literally "failing" upwards, in baby steps, turtle-speed, and that only results in success if you can somehow sustain doing that long enough.

The default is that nothing works out. People love to skip over this and always feel it doesn't apply to them and their idea. It will fail. The game is not to make a great product, the game is to figure out how to not go under while waiting for and/or constantly provoking your lucky break.

You can get lucky, and if you try long enough and often enough, you at least stand somehwat of a (very, very, very slim) chance. And, then, even if you do, all that luck is very brief and temporary and you'll be thirsty waiting for the next strike to stay above water. There is no "I made it" — there's only "I'm safe for a second, but what do I do next" in the very best of cases.

All that said, I believe it is totally worth the life experience. Life is short, it's a noteworthy thing to go through. But after a decade of failing, it'll quietly turn into a question of character, responsibility, psychological or social issues and general life-planning skills rather than a question of "do you want it hard enough to succeed".

Life is short.

Counter-argument to point 2: startups now raise 10X what they used to accomodate for bigtech-level salaries. It’s not uncommon for a senior eng to join a Series A with 200-300K base.

Not like it makes the ecosystem and startup math more reasonable, though...

Enterpreneurship is much more than just running a startup. You can build a product by bootstrapping it and start selling. You don't need to go all in from the very beginning, but you can build and try selling that. If it ever sticks, then you can go all in.

Also, you don't need to come up with something totally new that has never existed before. You can also build something that is already proven to have use for. Much easier to sell a little better or a little cheaper product to markets that exists instead of trying to create markets for something no-one has ever used before.

Everyone should follow what’s best for them. I love early stage, and venture/growth startups are exactly right for me.

I can totally understand why folks like working at FANG and it’s wonderful that software engineers can get paid proper large salaries with that lifestyle. It wasn’t always true, Google was the pioneer.

I took 5 years off to travel in 2013, and I’m starting a new company now without taking even a week off after Formlogic (my last startup) ran out of runway.

Understand what’s best for you and follow it. Happy to discuss early stage entrepreneurship with anyone wrestling with the question

I'm not sure that there's a startup winter at all, it looks like a web browser tech winter to me. AFAIK YC also changed their focus and now are looking for physical things much more - like supersonic jets.

There is only so much you can do with organizing information and entertainment through HTML and JS and make a profit of it. Maybe there will be a nice whiplash gold rush for making the web great again as this pile of garbage doesn't inspire anyone anymore.

That will happen as soon as a new business model alternative to what caused the enshittification appears. Alternatively, maybe a new tech will emerge that will offer freedoms and possibilities similar to the early days of the web.

Just need to move to a country where 30k USD is a good salary. Build the same stuff for far less.

Much of this is because ZIRP is gone. Getting OPM is harder when they have more options.

I think it should be noted that a lot of people do startups for reasons other than money. I was recently down in SF for an interview at a YC startup and later in the day, the two founders shared with me their salaries at their previous jobs. One was making 900k a year and the other was making 450k a year, but they ultimately decided to leave their big tech jobs to start their startup.

I'd go with that the industry has changed and that the makeup of the HN users has changed. I'd venture to guess that a much larger percent of HN users back in 2013 were really into startups than merely tech news.

What's really interesting is that the industry has changed. Back in 2013 or earlier, there were still many new scenarios. The mobile ecosystem was rapidly expanding, we probably tried new apps on a weekly basis if not daily. The cloud was still relatively new and many companies were either trying to figure out how to use cloud or leverge cloud. The enterprise world was getting interesting too, many infrastructure systems were popping up left and right. There was this genuine vibe that our life and work could benefit from tech. Now I'm not so sure. It feels like many people are quite content with the life, and it is increasingly harder to see what changes we'd really desire. As a result, the optimism about startups has also abated.

I've worked at startups and at a FAANG. For many years, I've told people that they should never do a startup for the $$$; their expected value is higher at a FAANG. They should do a startup only if they're interested in the technology or the people.

A lot in tech is driven by technological hardware progress: Cpu‘s faster, storage faster and bigger, network pipes thicker and more ubiquitous, power requirements lower. This progress has slowed down in the past decades creating fewer opportunities to put incremental innovation on a self rising pedestal. Today‘s hyperconnected and more centralized global economy makes it even harder - there are fewer markets and medium to large sized buyers. AI has some advantages still on the scaling and basic hardware optimization side but even there it seems hard to monetize reliably innovation.

That’s because of audiences changing. This isn’t a startup forum. It’s /r/technology+programming

I’ve seen numerous Eternal Septembers. Each culture thinks they won’t have it and unless they’re a pay-for service they will.

Fairly sure the vast majority of Hacker News isn't making 300k a year in either big tech _or_ startups. Plus the author of the post mentioned wasn't some scrappy gung-ho founder trying to make it at any cost, they had Google money and one of their stories was their resentment at their cofounders forcing a $10m exit of one of the companies. No offence to them, it was an interesting journey described very openly, but it didn't sound like they were looking for a pep talk.

I suspect Hacker News is just bigger and less skewed towards Silicon Valley than it was in 2013. Maybe that changes the vibe, but I don't think anyone is (or should be) deciding whether to do a startup based on the tone of comments on an internet forum.

I've been on HN since 2012 and have long been disappointed by what startups represent now. At the beginning, I thought startups were about technology, innovation and improving people's lives worldwide. But no, startups are about money, money and only money. No one cares about technology, the tech needed for PR and innovation is just for patents. Innovation ideas and technology can be bought by rich guys. Now it feels like a jar of spiders where a good idea is copied faster than it gets funding. It’s time to say that cleverness has beaten brains and we’re entering an era of copy-paste. As a result, the best innovations are lost. For example, over the last 10 years I invested in the best development environment for programmers, but no one else showed interest due to the weak marketing effect of signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah! marketing is above technology because no one will even hear about you and prices on big screens have skyrocketed. You need a Unicorn of $ to get shown to everyone. Gold nugget companies, where there is a balance of technology, money and non-tech are very rare.

There are like 20 new AI startups every day. Makes for a warm winter

Additionally, when the product is software based, the typical reaction is to post open source alternatives, because naturally any weekend project will do as alternative.

People have been campaigning for other people to avoid startups and just take jobs at big companies for the entire time I've been here.

I've been here for a long time and I didn't even know that this site was for startups until a few years ago.

I wonder how old the author is. I started working in 1997 at the height of the dot com boom. I knew people at multiple startups that got bought. People that were millionaires at age 25-30. I would get about 5 phone calls a week on my office phone from recruiters thinking I should leave.

In 2001 I saw all the layoffs and we had a reorg. The job and coworkers I loved turned into something I hated. No recruiters, no openings, it took me 10 months to find something new.

Since then I tried 2 startups and both were failures. In the first I don't regret it as my old job was not great. At the second I know that I made a mistake both professionally and financially. That was 5 years ago and if a recruiter contacts me for a startup I don't even reply. Not interested at all in the chaos and failed promises that was my startup experiences.

I think the second point in the article is the main reason - compensation from Big Tech changes the financial equation considerably. There's still a lot of upsides to starting a startup (as well as plenty of downsides), but the financial upsides are lessened compared to working in tech, and the opportunity cost of giving up a Big Tech salary is huge.

Is this the entire industry or just ycombinator?

I get the sense that they’ve been dramatically ramping up volume which inevitably has an impact on quality

It's more because people have realised that money is easier made outside of public space (crypto projects, scripts, other things that just extract money out of thin air) rather than by building something public that needs clients, investors, and exits.

I have yet to meet a single startup billionaire but i already know at least one person who made 1B+ through scripting and several who are in 9 digit range. It's just easier there because there is no law to abide (you are anonymous by definition, and frequently a sybil of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of fake people), and no need to "sell" or be liked by anyone.

It didn't exist before ~2017 because crypto/smart contracts were not a thing yet. SEO/SEO scams existed yes, but these never brought in comparable amounts of money and traditional startups looked more attractive in comparison. Today, many people just run dozens of solana nodes, guess how much they make?

What changed is the audience

Founders are in private group chats now

Man I miss it being real here instead of Reddit Jr

Grateful for those of you who still hang out

>> When senior engineers can make $300K+ at established companies

If your goal is to make a good salary at a stable company, I don't think a startup is a good choice. Doing a startup is like trying to become a rock star (though chances of success are probably 10X better).

In my opinion it is decentralized startup spring rather. Just because all do not go mainstream and some can't notice, it does not mean they do not exist. Next 20 years there'll be thousands tiktoks potentially.

Often much of such 'change' in similar considerations comes from yourself – you are older, maybe more risk averse, and hence much more biased in your assessment of the landscape.

extrapolating from one post instead of total Series A-F raised without accounting for interest rates as well as political motivations to weaken tech seems a bit sensational imo

Coming here after reading the second linked story in this article unexpected (and read this too) just before writing this thought, a new definition of startup is badly needed. The reason is that in the second story, half of the startups were mere ideas and were never executed/launched in the first place.

Furthermore, according to statistics, 1 out of 10 startups succeed on average or 90% startups fail within the first 10 years of launch.

So, we can say that startup is actually a winter game from the beginning.

I think a lot of very accurate reasons have been covered by others. These are my key points:

* COL in most areas has skyrocketed, housing and healthcare have both ballooned in cost massively. This has meant I'm much less likely to take risks that would put either of these at risk.

* My ideas aren't unique. I'm 99.9995% sure that the ideas I have floating around in my head for a startup are already covered by someone much more capable than I to execute them. Given that the main reason startups fail is a lack of market, and I'm definitely not the sort of person that can just make a market appear overnight... Yeah definitely not feeling like taking a risk on something likely either already served or which needs someone who can communicate to prospective customers why such a market should exist.

* I'm not interested in cashing out. My goal if I'm growing a business is to have something I enjoy and cherish. Not just to sell and cash out. (I say this now naively )

TLDR: The risk reward ratio in my estimation only favors the ultra wealthy, or unicorn engineers right now. I'm smart but I'm not that smart. My goal right now is to get enough money I can retire and work on projects I want to. If that means one of them becomes a startup, I'm good with that. But, I'm also not expecting to IPO or get VC backing if that happens.

> This shift isn't isolated to these two posts.

Is there a statistical analysis which backs this claim?

Lost its faith or its illusions?

DON'T DO IT should be the generic advice to anyone wanting to found/join a startup. You should only engage with startups if you have a good reason to. Just like you should only become a SoundCloud rapper if you fundamentally enjoy that life on a day-to-day basis, not because your goal is to throw champagne parties on yachts because you think all rappers get to do that as a payoff for the grind.

I’ve worked for 10 startups, 3 with successful exits, but only 1 of which made me a tangible financial boost; in true startup fashion this last success has more than paid for the rest. 2 of these startups were bootstrapped with cofounders that I later had a falling out with. This was a deeply horrible experience, at a time when I had no financial safety net. This made my self-esteem during key strategic decisions disorienting low. I had peers also founding startups during this time I was regularly in touch with, and they managed to be so much more level-headed than me, while I kept taking crazy risks or being too risk-averse. Years later, I realized most of the the "peer" cofounders I was comparing myself to had generational wealth. To them, founding a startup was more like a gap year. This was the roughest period of my life, and I actually have more spotty memory of this time than before or afterwards; literal brain damage.

I’ve ended up in startups so often because they enable you to tackle interesting problems holistically. I’m happier and more useful in this mode of work, rather than at an established company where you end up having to use existing, out-of-date models in team roles that are relatively silo'd. As an early startup employee, you can get an incredible amount of latitude you wouldn't otherwise. Founders should be leaning into this as part of the employment offer - you can't pay as much as a big company, but if your employee wants every Wednesday off because they do a weekly silent yoga retreat, you can say yes to that, while a big company wouldn't. The worst times I've had working for founders are when:

1. They treat the startup like their baby, and try to micromanage it like it's still only 2-3 people when the team has grown to a few dozen.

2. They think of the startup like it's their gap year, and don't actually care about product success. They want to continue with their original on-a-pedestal hypothesis for 2-3 years without attempting pivoting into potential traction. They run out of investor's money, and then get upper-level management jobs at large companies. I'm not offended at the waste of VC money, but rather the waste of human effort; we could have potentially found user value. If we aren't going to do aggressively pursue that, at least let me mess around with my own nonsense instead of insisting I stick to the product roadmap we all know isn't going to go anywhere useful.

Our primary model for creating new value is VC-backed startups, where the payoff is huge if you win, but unsustainable and demoralizing for anything else. This incentivizes startups and their investors to shoot for the moon and miss rather than seek lifestyle businesses which could have been a great contribution to the infrastructure of society. I wish the other R&D models got more attention: think tanks, government grant-based orgs, etc. I've done R&D work in academia, but I've found unfortunately that people are so ephemeral, so while most of the work is intelligent, it's quality is fragile and isn't reusable engineering. One exception would be some of the university-backed open data institutions https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/us-state-level-conservati...

All that being said, I am currently bootstrapping a startup now! This time, I have a long personal runway, and I am quite happy. I am working with 1 part-time contractor, and at the stage where I'm discussing a raise with a few angels to hire a full-time team. However, if this raise doesn't work out, the path forward for the next ~2 years is the same, just more gradual.

A few problems with this view:

1) Big corporations continue to struggle with doing in house innovation. Hiring more people doesn't seem to work. Just look at the infamously long and ever growing list of failed Google stuff. They are spending billions on this stuff. And most of it fails. Most large companies struggle with doing big new things in house.

2) There continue to be successful startups challenging/disrupting those big companies and occasionally scaring them into action (like acquisitions). And some of these startups are well funded.

3) Most Big Tech companies have been downsizing over the last few years. Job security maybe isn't that amazing if layoff rounds are a regular thing. And bigger salaries also means more scrutiny when layoffs happen. Also see #1: if projects aren't working out, layoffs are quick way to cut the losses. Getting caught up in one of these doomed corporate innovation things is maybe not great as a job security plan.

Also, post covid, the notion of physically locating development teams close to San Francisco is no longer that much of an automatic thing. I see a lot of startups here in Berlin that only have a token presence in the US (not necessarily Silicon Valley) and do all/most of their tech in Europe. It used to be that startups would physically move to the Valley after raising money. That seems to happen much less these days. Mostly, US presence for such companies is limited to sales and marketing.

And there are also lots of US startups setting up teams abroad. Why pay a premium for commodity development teams? Especially if you just raised a few million, you are on the spot to deliver. Going on a spending spree in the Valley maybe isn't the best way to do that.

This kind of conversations give me a cofidence, so thanks.

  > The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

I'd like to add a point here.

There's still lots of low hanging fruit. But so much of this is hard to implement in a way that won't be immediately replicated by a major player. So good luck displacing them.

I think HN lost its audience of the commoners and gained a audience of billionaire for billonaire products - and billionaire related prodcuts that are services to milk the comoners.

Add to that, that every tech advance gives birth to horrible destructive potential that is realized- you have growing despair.

I mean, in the second example there's not even any hypothetical: It factually WAS better for him working at Google and getting rich that way than any of his startups. There's optimism and there's denying historical reality.

Dot com bubble mark 2 coming?

I see a lot of naivety in some of the AI startups - excited by the AI - but not really understanding the business they are trying to apply it to.

Also a lot of carnivorous sheep and grifters attracted by the money.

Scenario 1: an ambitious guy in his early twenties fails and writes anonymously about how it feels to see your company collapse and your investors shun you. He felt alone and ashamed and he had to pick himself up.

Scenario 2: a guy who already made millions in tech and who is a venture capitalist on the side coyly brags about his business failures.

Can you see how they are not the same?

HN has become a very conservative forum (in the temperamental, not political sense). There is far more skepticism of new technologies in the comments, and a much stronger status quo bias than there used to be.

But I think this is more reflective of a shift in the makeup of HN commenters than of society as a whole. The people I work with today don’t seem any different, on average, than the people I worked with 20 years ago.

good riddance

(new) Data Sources and methods of collection have been maxed out, or rather, reached a plateau or, to be radically honest, the homogeneity of founders / techies / researchers has reached an unhealthy maximum / imbalance, which happened because VC and the financial culture in general is ... well, a bit too IQy, ...

it's a bit like psychology that, despite being true and insanely valuable, is bad for crowd control, to put it in slightly conspiratorial ( cooperative portfolio ) terms.

and there's of course the issue of the variety of engineers they grew and research fields they expanded. the narrowing of the playing field, in general.

but hey, let's read some PG article that distracts us with fake honey & not really milk, produced in shlobbering portfolio communist environments that spread back doors into teen minds to use perverted live telemetry to build poofy, roofie-craving consumers

buncha cookie cutter folks on here who feel safe with their high compensation while they sit at their standing desk and drink their hot green tea. then they pick up their child from private school and kiss their wife who secretly finds them incredibly boring.

It is insane I have to say this, but this quite literally is the best time ever to start a startup.

The sheer leverage that AI provides founders today is simply astounding. I have leveraged AI tools to build things I would never have been able to build just several years ago.

The case in point would be it is now extremely easy to create Chrome plugins that automate aspects of my business simply by asking Claude to do so.

Another example I can point to is the use of GPT to create documentation for government tenders. Many of these tenders need supporting documents that, quite frankly, I would not have been able to create on my own. Everything from how to create documentation around modern slavery and supply chain audits, to indigenous inclusion. This is stuff they simply don't teach you at university.

We are living in a golden age where a solo founder can create so much value on their own.

This is not to say I'm not worried for the future, I very much am. I'm worried about an economic routing of the middle class caused by AI taking white-collar jobs...

>The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff?

Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on