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A comment on Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008). Parent comment

Re:Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008) by AussieWog93 on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @07:14PM (#34435029)
> Tech isn't dead forever, and what's a good idea today will still be a good idea in a couple years.

Just as a couple of concrete examples:

A paid-for app was a great idea in 2009, but a bad idea in 2013.

A dedicated handheld PlayStation was a great idea in 2005 but an awful idea in 2012.

Self-driving car companies were a great idea in 2017, but a bad idea in 2020.

I think the point is that technology changes and sometimes you need to strike whole the iron's hot.

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Re:Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008) by jrockway on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @08:29PM (#34435613)
Aren't you just seeing your failed business without actually having to fail? You have some idea to change the world, someone copies it, they failed miserably; how do you lose there?

There are so many things that were "before their time" and failed, like garbage-collected programming languages. C beat Lisp, because GC was too slow. Then Java beat C, because manual memory management was too dangerous. Being too early is almost scarier than being too late.

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