Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?
Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.
Did Valve corporation do something like that?
There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.
One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).
And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.
It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.
Before YouTube there was Google Video, which was moderately successful (it was just that YouTube was more successful, so it got acquired).
But there are just my opinions, of course.
See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation
Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...
I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.
I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.
Google3/Borg ecosystem should have been productized but that'll never happen now the way things are evolving.
What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...
* EA/Origin
* Epic
* Ubisoft
EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).
Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".
I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.
They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.
However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.
I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.
Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.
Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector
Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.
Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.
Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.
And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.
[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.
But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.
Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.
Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.
I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.
But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.
(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)
You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.
It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.
Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.
If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?
If you go public, no way to prevent it.
You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.
Growth and private investment are part and parcel.
Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value
It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.
Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.
SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.
Update: Looks like they are:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute
[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]
>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:
No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025
Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...
That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.
the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.
for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.
The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?
The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.
Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.
It’s growth period.
It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.
But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.
You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.
That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.
My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.
I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.
There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.
This is typically termed a "belief".
dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).
Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife
This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.
Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.
I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.
OpenAI?
This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.
If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.
Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.
I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.
Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)
That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.
OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.
It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.
Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.
It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.
I agree that Google should have been forced to pay licensing fees, and OpenAI should too.
We know from history that's unlikely to happen.
They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.
> Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”
> Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.
https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...
Whats the solution ?
Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.
_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.