gartdavis

"elaborate foot guns" -- HN is a high signal environment, but I could read for a week and not find a gem like this. Props.

Destiny visits me on my 18th birthday and says, "Gart, your mediocrity will result in a long series of elaborate foot guns. Be humble. You are warned."

Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now.

I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany.

Three factors made this very difficult:

-- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal.

-- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work.

-- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity.

In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived.

This would be much harder now.

Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential.

Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet.

A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.

I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.

I've always loved being confounded by unexpected stories like this. 20 years ago, I was working to build a self-publishing company - lulu.com - that would open up the world of book publishing. It was not an easy journey. In 2005 a book was published on the site that told the story of this welsh-patagonian exclave. It sold hundreds of copies in Wales and Argentina. In its narrow space, it was as much a 'bestseller' as anything in the NYTimes, and it was clear that it would never have been published or reached this audience any other way. It was a benediction on our labors.

"William Casnodyn Rhys, a young theology student, dreamed of establishing a Welsh colony where the Welsh language and culture could be preserved...."

https://www.lulu.com/shop/william-casnodyn-rhys/a-welsh-song...

Is this an empathy test?

The Canadian government drove its primary aerospace company, Avro Canada, not just into bankruptcy/reorganization, but to completely shutdown operations. The country lost 14,000 aerospace professionals, but more importantly, it lost its leadership position in cutting edge aerospace. Its best engineers left for the USA or the UK. Canada, more than a half century later, has never recovered anything like the leadership role it had built during the post-war period. Be careful what you ask for.

a_bonobo.... I think you're digging in the right vein here, but to perhaps to make the point clearer we could separate the discussion into two:

In an AI laden world

1) How are artists relevant

2) How are artists fairly compensated

I believe the answer to 1) is as you say, simply in the word 'new'. AI functionally remixes toward a mean. You can improve the impression of this with exquisite sources or more nuanced algorithms, but the result is always, literally, average.

I believe that an artist works out of an authentic story that is much more than the sum of their influences, and is uniquely their own. This story is the value proposition that is offered to an appreciant - it is an expression of identity that rises above the noise, and that can be joined. Mechanisms of payment have changed with the gyrations of technology, culture, and power since the concept of 'art' was birthed. But as long as there is a distinctive story in an artist's work, I believe there will always be a path to compensation.

One way to think about this is that color is information. We have a processing capacity for this information that became fully saturated somewhere between 1967 and 1973, and since then we've been creating a surplus that everyone has to filter out as noise. In that context, it makes sense to me that consumers (and marketers, and product designers) now choose simplicity over the radiant chaos of Jackson Pollock, Peter Max, or Ronald McDonald.

Brexit was about UK nativism. As the USA steps out of its own nativist administration, the UK has fewer like-minded global partners with real shared interests.

I'm an American that lived in London for 2 years in the 90s - the high tide for an American abroad - so that's the POV I bring to your question. The following decades have seen mostly retrograde changes. I cannot imagine it becoming -easier- for a non-native in Britain in the 2020s... can you? Germany and even France now bring a genuine interest in cultivating technology economies by welcoming global investors AND workers. I would put Berlin or even Paris ahead of London for the next decade if you're looking for an exciting soup of technology culture, opportunity, reasonable costs, and relative freedom to operate. I'm not being arbitrary in saying this - the company I co-founded, Spoonflower, runs its European operations out of Berlin.

That said, I loved London and still do - such a civilized place to visit. I was there just before Covid times, and was absolutely amazed by the changes to LHR immigration and Crossrail that allowed me to go from deplaning my transatlantic flight to my hotel in central London in 55 minutes. I can't wait for the city to re-open and Crossrail to be complete. There are few pleasures to equal a walk by the Thames on a long sunny day - perhaps summer 2021?

Lulu.com - book self publishing. Discussions between Amazon & Lulu led to the reproduction of every use case over the following 24 months. I worked at Lulu.

While I appreciate the sentiment of this RFS with regards to the sclerotic dysfunction of the legal system of copyright (and the business models that perpetuate it), truth be told, as a life-long citizen of startupworld I've often found myself quite jealous of the Hollywood business model. Hollywood is a start-up machine that places huge bets and enables entrepreneurs to form teams, create product, and achieve success or failure 10 or more times in a decade. What a liberating notion!

Looking at the talented nerd in their third or fifth year slogging away at a successful enterprise with the possible monetization of their efforts still years over the horizon, I find myself asking: are there ways to make startupworld more like Hollywood? Perhaps there is something to learn from the way that the 'talent' in hollywood works with the 'money'.

As a thought exercise, what if doing a start-up was like making a film. Teams assemble, shuffle, and disassemble in an orderly fashion. Artisans are measured in a regular and public way and trade on their value. Quality results are rewarded in short iterative cycles. Its possible for the very best young talent to rise to the top of the profession in ~5 years. Entrepreneurs are funded by the 'money' with terms that are transparent, reasonably standard, and public, so shockingly free of embarrassingly predatory clauses. Shorter cycles, quicker valuation/monetization, a system that screens talent and quickly elevates the best.

Oh wait a minute, PG and the Ycomb revolution is actually making all this stuff happen. Which is why I find this conversation amusingly ironic. "Kill hollywood" coming from the institution that is doing the most to re-make the money/talent relationship in startupworld in Hollywood's image. So what keeps them from finishing the job?

So this is my real point. Startupworld has its own legal system with sclerotic dysfunction every bit as entrenched as copyright; it effectively bars start-ups from achieving a plurality of investors in common shares at any revenue level below $200m. There's lots of manifestations and motivations for this, but fundamentally, its bad for startupworld and to stretch just a bit, bad for capitalism and democracy.

There was a time not too long ago when an excellent young company with $20m in revenues could sell common shares to common people. What a liberating notion! How can we put a SOPA/PIPA-like focus on this issue and sway lawmakers, change votes, write legislation and move governments.

While I appreciate the 'kill hollywood' discussion of revolutionizing entertainment... I have to confess that its just not nearly as big a problem, and not nearly as broken as the world all of us work in every day. I'm jealous that Hollywood, through its own ignorance, has managed to marshal our industry's best efforts to midwife its own creative rebirth.

What about us?