Unfortunately, this is predictable. Indignation activates generic responses and, above all, attracts upvotes. It feels great in the short term but leads HN to duller, more obvious places. This pattern is dismayingly reliable. A large part of what we do as HN moderators is to try to counteract it. HN can't live by upvotes alone.
If I compare the relatively low quality of this subthread to the more modest and far more interesting responses that people had to the specific details of the article, the contrast is striking.
I don't mean to pick on you personally! We are all subject to this phenomenon and few of us are very conscious of it in ourselves. There was another example even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don't fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it's a co-creation, and the upvotes probably do more harm than the comments. I am sure you had no intention of feeding it. Unfortunately it happens anyway.
p.s. Perhaps I should add that there's nothing wrong with a critique of VC on HN. HN has hosted countless such critiques. Possibly more have appeared here than anywhere else. The HN community is overwhelmingly (90+%) outside of Silicon Valley, and the majority of it strongly identifies against the VC system (while often feeling itself to be the minority, as if HN overall were of the opposite view).
Rather, the problem is that this was a less interesting direction for the discussion to go, when the actual topic—an onion business!—was much rarer and more curious. What fuels generic tangents is not intellectual curiosity, but a quite different cocktail of emotions. As I said, a large part of moderating HN consists of trying to tease those apart. Trying and mostly failing.
Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insights
Me: I sell onions on the internet
So good.
My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture.
People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use.
Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.
Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech.
How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly?
Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.
A man approached the salesman upon seeing various colors of different fishing lures being on display. He asked whether those different colors actually work in attracting and catching fishes. The salesman promptly replied "Mister, I'm not selling these to fishes."
If these people are targeting VC money, they don't care if their products actually help solving problems for end consumers (aka the fishes), they just need to know what triggers the VC to invest. Even Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, has lost $130 million in Bitcoin after listening to pitches from those crypto startup CEOs. This is how most businesses fail but hey at least it keeps the money flowing.
Those VC operate based on the principle in which if you throw enough spaghetti onto a wall, even though most will fall off but a few are always bound to stick.
Believe me, nobody knows anything in advance and everything is purely a game of chance, but once somebody gets lucky they can immediately declare themselves as the expert. They start selling books and everyone else would rush out to buy and follow exactly the same steps only to find out most of it just don't work. This same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Why? The market is not static, it constantly moves and changes around so you are already way behind by the time you apply those same strategies. Plus your personal life and connections are completely different than the other person's so you can't realistically expect the same results.
It's still necessary to learn what has worked because new levels are always built on top of the old ones. But this demonstrates why mathematics, or the rule of randomness, is a universal language that governs everything in our life.
Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s
http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
Excerpts:
> No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.
> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
> Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.
That made me chuckle because I recall walking across the office in 1992, looking at a machine in the corner, and thinking "wow, with this Internet stuff the way it's going I really want to write some clever software, put it on a machine like that and watch my bank account balance grow...".
And it has been fun to watch out that all played out subsequently.
Do you have a source of solid figures to back up that 90%?
About three quarters last more than a year, about half last to 5 years, and about a third last to 10 years.
Does the UK government split into VC backed and not VC-backed? I always thought that number only holds for the "go big or go home" type of business (i.e. VC backed), not for normal ones.
It was a pleasingly refreshing reminder of the old days of the dotcom boom ... a web site for pets! a web site for hotels! a web site for buying onions! anything was possible in those days. Pleasant memories.
Turns out that a website for buying onions was a missed-trick back in those days! (...or was it?)
Great to hear about these business opportunities sprouting up and getting acted on in an honest and decent way.
Good read. Thanks :)
Sounds like my story, where i teamed up with a baker who makes really good cookies. I did all the design and development on nights and weekends. Its only been running for a few months but we've processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. https://cravecookie.co
I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.
At the start of the year, the idea of creating a forum for professionals kept clawing at me, but I couldn't think of a good domain name that wasn't taken. I wanted a .com but I looked at the ones I owned and just went with it weknow.services. A month ago Upwork announced they'd start charging freelancers for "Connects" to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking "Where else can I look" and quickly replied to someone saying I'd been working on this thing, however I was banned from /r/freelance for even citing it.
I'm not banking on the fact that it'll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It's something that would help me as a freelancer, and I have future plans if things pan out and users find it useful. If anything it's made me realize how hard marketing is.
> Wanna see behind the scenes?
This sent me through a gamut of emotions. First, was some revulsion at how informal it was. Then I chastised myself because it doesn't matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don't mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :/
Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.
Here's an article that attempts to answer your question, and goes into great detail:
https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion...
TLDR: Vidalia is milder. Walla Walla has a more complex flavor profile.
And everyone out there is about becoming a billion $ or more company... What happened to normal ideas, ideas that can literally feed a few families and make you have a good life as well...
Person behind the article seems to enjoy himself and also seems to be feeding a few farms as well that provide him with onions. Amazing work!
A founder's story (when it's told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it's hard to follow, or so clean it lacks drama. The central conflict will usually be foreshadowed in the introduction, rear its ugly head half-way through, then come to a climax at the end of the narrative leaving just enough space for a sales pitch.
So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold.
At which point, that founder then goes around and tells the same stereotypical story of dropping out of college, running out of money and getting investment on the day they were planning on giving up, etc. We have all heard the bullshit before.
So I was genuinely grateful to read a real business story. The owner saw an opportunity, took it when other people probably wouldn't have, and just genuinely worked hard to get where he is.
This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life.