Don't get me wrong; it was a good experience, as well as being good experience. I got paid a decent salary throughout, the work was frequently interesting, and my coworkers were great, not that I've done a good job of keeping in touch.
But it wasn't a life-changing payday, and even the investors mostly broke even. It was a success in that it became profitable with a couple mil in revenue, not in the VC sense.
Besides the whole period where we ran out of money, laid off half the company, and were months away from going under, the only real downside was that, as a small company, I was basically on call 24/7 to deal with problems with my part of the world. It didn't come up often but when it did it sucked.
* https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-private-equity-...
What advice could you share for discovering this kind of problems that also can also be monetized?
It’s a quite boring project, but it is niche - and there is no alternative, at least not in the JS/TS ecosystem. Many startups/crypto/financial institutions (including YC startups) uses and are paying customers of my product.
I’ve tried finding an investor (including YC) to grow the project but no-one is interested. It doesn’t matter, I’ll keep going anyway. But if someone is interested reach me at [email protected]
I wonder how much innovation is being stifled by this practice. I know I have at least one very viable idea (I've shopped it around) that could result in substantial improvement to the overall Internet experience, and I'm doing nothing with it because the minute I make it available, a Big Tech company will either steal it, try to buy me out (and I don't like them so my answer will be no) and then copy/reverse engineer what I've done. So I've opted to spend my time/energy on something else.
Basically what's the opportunity cost of these uncompetitive practices for the industry and field of study as a whole?
How many Einsteins perished in the fields or trenches? How much innovation and genius is stifled through lack of access to food, water or education?
I think that would be an area where improvements would be more impactful than trying to prevent copycats.
If BigTech gets into it, that will be a positive signal which will make idea known and make a market of customers for it. I have no need to be the first, but just be in the game.
It's annoying that even the successes tend to screw over the employees and more often than not the founders as well. Typical dilution by the time you reach series 'A' (assuming that that's all that you need to take off) is terrible and if you need more capital you end up working for banks and VCs.
If I were to start another company (which I am trying very hard to avoid) I would try extremely hard to do it without outside capital and I would do it in some boring b2b field where nobody else wants to go because it isn't sexy enough to be able to attract capital. That way you avoid several of the risks of starting a new company at once: you have a relatively safe niche, no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share and the people that will receive your product are going to be super happy simply because there is no alternative.