Re:After the end of the startup era
by hkmurakami on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:00PM
(#15528633)
The journalist reveals his or her ignorance by not considering Gusto or Flexport to be well positioned, imo.
Several companies with $1B valuations were missed:
Reddit
Zenefits
Gusto
Docker
Flexport
Coinbase
Twitch.tv
Quora
Door Dash
Machine Zone
MixpanelPlus the article could do with some basic fact checking.
"The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb"
Wikipedia AirBnB page: "Founded August 2008; 9 years ago"
Re:After the end of the startup era
by hkmurakami on Sunday October 22, 2017 @07:37PM
(#15529665)
Also iirc Amazon predates 1997. 1997 is its IPO date.
Yeah, Gusto is a big win IMO. Payroll stuff sucks, especially for early stage businesses. I've used all the services over the past 15 years, my current company is using Gusto, still sucks, but sucks the least, best price, best service. And 1000s of small businesses trust Gusto to process millions of dollars of their most sacred money each month. Underrated.
Zenpayroll was great! Gusto sucks. And the change took place right around the time of the name change.
Now, both Gusto and Zenefits are trying to play the same game and both are basically parasitic companies feeding off lock-in and transaction fees.
Re:After the end of the startup era
by hkmurakami on Monday October 23, 2017 @02:23AM
(#15531098)
Really curious what changed between ZP and Gusto. (we only use their basic payroll product)
Which payroll and benefits providers make their money a different way?
"We’re already seeing this. Consider Y Combinator, by all accounts the gold standard of startup accelerators, famously harder to get into than Harvard. Then consider its alumni. Five years ago, in 2012, its three poster children were clearly poised to dominate their markets and become huge companies: AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe. And so it came to pass."
"Fast forward to today, and Y Combinator’s three poster children are… unchanged. In the last six years YC have funded more than twice as many startups as they did in their first six — but I challenge you to name any of their post-2011 alumni as well-positioned today as their Big Three were in 2012. The only one that might have qualified, for a time, was Instacart. But Amazon broke into that game with Amazon Fresh, and, especially, their purchase of Whole Foods."
Look at the list of Ycombinator companies from the 2012 batch.[1] Where are they now?
[1] http://yclist.com/