Re:Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months
by smacktoward on Friday January 15, 2016 @05:21PM
(#10912668)
> That has always been the VC-funded startup model.
No it hasn't. Intel, Apple, 3Com, Compaq, DEC, and Lotus are all companies that took venture capital to get started. They are also all companies whose business model was "make things and then sell them for more than they cost to make" instead of "aggregate a lot of eyeballs and then figure out how to make money off them later." There's nothing special about venture capital that requires one model or the other.
What's changed is the underlying need for venture capital in the first place. It was originally needed because the things startups wanted to make and sell required a huge up-front investment to get started -- building fabs or factories, hiring lots of engineers and programmers, etc. There was just no way to bootstrap a business that needed so much cash up front, so VC money made businesses possible that otherwise could not have ever gotten off the ground.
Nowadays the cost lots of that stuff that people had to expensively do for themselves has been commoditized down to nearly nothing, so nobody really needs VC just to get started anymore. What they need VC for is to get big faster than their competitors, in order to muscle those competitors out of the marketplace. And VCs need horses to bet on, so when all the horses are running the "get big fast" game, their money is going to flow towards the companies that show the best possibility of getting big fast. Which is to say, companies that make stuff and then give it away for free.
And there's a prisoner's dilemma element to that -- if you are the one VC who's still interested in funding companies that make stuff to sell at a profit, your investments will get clobbered by competitors funded by all the other VCs who are giving it away. So you have to play the game, whether you want to or not.
No it hasn't. Intel, Apple, 3Com, Compaq, DEC, and Lotus are all companies that took venture capital to get started. They are also all companies whose business model was "make things and then sell them for more than they cost to make" instead of "aggregate a lot of eyeballs and then figure out how to make money off them later." There's nothing special about venture capital that requires one model or the other.
What's changed is the underlying need for venture capital in the first place. It was originally needed because the things startups wanted to make and sell required a huge up-front investment to get started -- building fabs or factories, hiring lots of engineers and programmers, etc. There was just no way to bootstrap a business that needed so much cash up front, so VC money made businesses possible that otherwise could not have ever gotten off the ground.
Nowadays the cost lots of that stuff that people had to expensively do for themselves has been commoditized down to nearly nothing, so nobody really needs VC just to get started anymore. What they need VC for is to get big faster than their competitors, in order to muscle those competitors out of the marketplace. And VCs need horses to bet on, so when all the horses are running the "get big fast" game, their money is going to flow towards the companies that show the best possibility of getting big fast. Which is to say, companies that make stuff and then give it away for free.
And there's a prisoner's dilemma element to that -- if you are the one VC who's still interested in funding companies that make stuff to sell at a profit, your investments will get clobbered by competitors funded by all the other VCs who are giving it away. So you have to play the game, whether you want to or not.