Tag: startup

overrated 37signals

The reason why I canceled my Basecamp account is that I’ve lost faith in 37 Signals. I’m not sure if it’s arrogance from the growth and success of their company, but their glow has fizzled. I’m still a fan of some of the simple functionality of their applications… but the applications as a whole don’t seem to be changing the landscape as they had done in the past.

heh. i actually like 37signals stirring the pot. they are overblown, but the sheeple need more kicks in the groin.

Lack of Web 2.0 innovation

Much of the “easy” innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap – thanks to open source, simple – thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive – thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising. Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.

good riddance. hopefully making room for true innovation like tesla motors or spacex. if you can code it up in a weekend, why bother?

The Penny Gap

The truth is, scaling from $5-$50M is not the toughest part of a new venture – it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. I can’t think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution. Can you?

why paid services are mostly dead, at least in consumer markets

Blue Origin

mr bezos new space venture. bringing rocket-powered space exploration to the masses.
2015-11-24: not a bad way for blue origin to come out of stealth mode, but this is no spacex so far.

2016-09-18:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would like to see a fully colonized solar system. Bezos also has a rocket company Blue Origin and he has helped fund General Fusion. Blue Origin moves toward its goal of having “millions of people living and working in space,” the company has launched and landed the same rocket 4x in a row, an unprecedented feat aimed at ultimately lowering the cost of space travel. By 2018, it plans to fly tourists on short jaunts past the edge of space in capsules designed with large windows.

“I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system. Think how cool that would be. You’d have a 1000 Einsteins at any given moment—and more. There would be so much dynamism with all of that human intelligence. But you can’t do that with the resources on Earth or the energy on earth. So if you really want to see that kind of dynamic civilization as we expand through the solar system, you have to figure out how to safely move around and use resources that you get in space.”

“I think NASA should work on a space-rated nuclear reactor. If you had a nuclear reactor in space– especially if you want to go anywhere beyond Mars, you really need nuclear power. Solar power just gets progressively difficult as you get further away from the sun. And that’s a completely doable thing to have a safe, space-qualified nuclear reactor.”

and

Rumors circulate of Bezos stepping back from his chief executive role at Amazon. He wants to spend more than the 1 day a week he works on Blue Origin

“I’m perfectly willing to fund this for as long as is required. There are way easier ways to make money. You don’t go through the list of best risk-return possibilities and find spaceflight. That’s not it. The reason you do this is because you’re a missionary for this. You’re passionate about it.”

2018-04-26:

SpaceX has growing revenue which is crushing Amazon stock funded Blue Origin. Blue Origin new Glenn rocket might be flying by 2020 and could have 3 to 8 commercial flights by 2023. By the end of 2020, SpaceX should have 100 more commercial launches and by 2023 will have 200+ commercial launches and should be flying the SpaceX BFR.

2018-10-05:

Blue Moon is a robotic space cargo carrier and lander design concept for making cargo deliveries to the Moon. Designed by Blue Origin, and as of 2018 planned to be operated by Blue Origin, on a mission aimed for 2024. Blue Moon benefits from the vertical landing technology heritage used in Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket. The lander is planned to be capable of delivering 4500 kilograms to the surface of the Moon. The cargo vehicle could also be used to support NASA activities in cislunar space, or transport payloads of ice from Shackleton Crater to support space activities. Blue Origin began development work on the lander in 2016, publicly disclosed the project in 2017, and unveiled a mockup of the Blue Moon lander in May 2019.

2021-10-02 update, it appears they’re trying to cut corners:

Safety concerns about Blue Origin’s New Shepard crewed suborbital flight, which took place on 20 July, were dismissed in an atmosphere that discourages dissent and free discussion. At Blue Origin, a common question during high-level meetings was, “When will Elon or Branson fly?” Competing with other billionaires—and “making progress for Jeff”—seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule. In the opinion of an engineer who has signed on to this essay, “Blue Origin has been lucky that nothing has happened so far.” Many of this essay’s authors say they would not fly on a Blue Origin vehicle. And no wonder—we have all seen how often teams are stretched beyond reasonable limits. In 2019, the team assigned to operate and maintain one of New Shepard’s subsystems included only a few engineers working long hours. Their responsibilities, in some of our opinions, went far beyond what would be manageable for a team double the size, ranging from investigating the root cause of failures to conducting regular preventative maintenance on the rocket’s systems.

Ruthless enough for a startup?

lots of successful startups started with shady practices

There seem to be some dismal lessons in these stories. It appears the ideal startup will give away something that used to cost money for free (preferably copyright material and porn), use other people’s content and resources, appeal to the baser human instincts (especially vanity and sex), and spam massive e-mail lists at launch.