throwaway55671

Do you mean hospitals, 911 dispatch centers and other critical infrastructure buys and deploys software without having the legal department carefully analyze the terms and conditions, based on the marketing materials only?

Angel investments are small - 10s to low 100s thousands. If the founders were software engineers, they should be able to cover the investments from their savings. And if they got salary from the startup they founded, it's theirs to use however they see fit. They can also trade their stock or take loans using it as collateral. VCs usually participate in approving founder compensation, so I don't see it as funneling.

I order my food or go to a restaurant every day.

It is very fun with small amounts of money.

Per capita is a dumb indicator for this, though. USA has GDP in tens of trillions. Ireland has 47 times less than that.

> They frequently rank highest on happiness measures

If half of young people have low levels of mental wellbeing, perhaps the composite average indicator is not so useful.

Free houses sounds very unlimited to me.

It's a Unix like OS with great separation of concerns. There probably is a way - their browser runs on Linux - but I don't think anyone has done it yet. Could be a fun project to look into!

> Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.

SerenityOS might be exactly what you're looking for. Join the community and make some apps, it's great (both the community and the OS/dev experience)!

Total nonsense about Prague. There are 2 great techno clubs/bars on each Žižkov, Vršovice or Holešovice street, lol. It's mostly locals and expats listening to guys doing it for fun with no managers or marketing (or entrance fees), so yeah it makes sense you have no idea if you don't live there, but just walk around the city and listen.

Let me get you a list for your next Prague trip: Fuchs 2, Bike Jesus, Altenburg, Bukanýr, Ankali, Roxy, Onyx, Jilská 22, Swim, Centrála, Cross, Storm, Chapeau Rouge, Planeta Za, Wildt, Mecca, Studio ... That's just the very well known ones, then you have hundreds of random small unknown places with great unknown DJs all around the city, and many great rave events in places like nuclear bunkers, castles, churches, forests.

The mainstream event halls normally used for big artist concerts are now hosting raves too.

Prague

> established or up and coming DJs

Well there's the problem. What you should compare is how many unknown new guys just making good music for fun in small unknown clubs visited by locals are there.

In my city I can go to a random non-descript bar with zero marketing or entrance fee, sit down peacefully with a drink, and hear world class techno together with few dozen strangers. Every evening. Doesn't feel that way in Berlin anymore, even if I pay it's all that global commercial style that the established DJs with promoter/management teams seem to fall into and the places are totally overcrowded.

I'd definitely be willing to accept reduced output if the price was right. Less income is better than no income. This could significantly increase the value proposition of solar projects in northern areas.

Also, nowadays night time electricity is more expensive than sunshine peaks when solar is at full output: https://www.ote-cr.cz/en/short-term-markets/electricity/day-...

> Even then, the size of the orbiting reflector would need to be absolutely gargantuan to reflect enough sunlight to be useful.

That assumes they try to do it with just one mirror, right? What if they have a system of multiple mirrors passing the sunlight from the sunny side?

Sure, I agree, this is just my own high level strategy that works for me but might not for you and your situation.

From what I saw, marketing is about data and a lot of money. If you don't have that, it's about having a big profile online account that people follow and trust - but I'm just not the person to build that, posting my stream of consciousness multiple times a day makes me cringe and my jokes are not funny. So I went B2B because I spent my career in large enterprises and understand them.

The same thing applies, though - people buy solutions from people they trust.

I sell software consulting services - a very saturated market. I bought access to a SaaS/database of companies and key management phone numbers, identified which companies use technologies I can offer from their job posts etc, and started calling. Many declined, many were rude to me, but at the end I found one that needed immediate help I could offer.

Offer solutions to problems, not products. Don't talk about all your features - ask them whether they have the problem you're solving and tell them about your solution. You'll have to get creative to get them talking - model situations, past successes and case studies of your other clients... Don't try to milk them - just set a fair price and be open about it, people don't like feeling you're going to take advantage of them. Build rapport, friendship and trust.

Check out how Michael Scott sells. I'm doing it just like him, it really works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWwfdb2A88

Let me repeat the edited-in question at the end of my first comment:

How many cold calls with prospective customers do you have daily? How often do you talk to people who might be interested on LinkedIn or other professional forums/social networks? How often do you attend in-person professional/networking events, conferences, tech talks? If you're not doing that at least few times a week, your odds are very low.

I used to build like you, do SEO and marketing, etc. But people buy from people - it's about trust. I got my first client after I finally took the phone and started calling - had to do it for 3 weeks (hundreds of calls, ugh) but it worked out. I got my second client when I went to my ~15th professional event. I had a big streak of luck on my ~20th event - 3 clients after one evening. I'd never get to have this kind of luck if I didn't try 20 times.

Why not? A large percentage of GDP is about making things other businesses use to do their business. I'm getting spammed by ads from bigger companies doing the same thing - "become our partner / make money with our products / distribute to others who could make money with our products". Same thing, different niche.

It's a valid niche - and the one you talk about is terminally online, which makes it rather easy to break into.

Consistency isn't a strategy, indeed. It's not meant to be. It means you have to keep trying - what strategy you use is a different question. You should make one, try it out a statistically significant amount of times, measure and decide whether to keep it or modify it.

> I'm one step away from claiming that their success is pure luck, as in "being in the right time with the right people", rather than some effort that they've put it which helped them acquire customers, and I'm simply unlucky.

It's definitely a lot of luck - but don't think it's just that. Relentless drive and stellar performance in many different fields (tech, marketing, sales etc) is absolutely necessary and practically no amount of luck would help you without that. You have to keep trying to get lucky and be ready to take and milk the opportunity when it happens.

The luck is not in getting customers, though, especially not in B2C. That's just about product-market fit and marketing. I know people who can consistently do it again and again with any product or service that makes sense - and of course appropriate budget.

It's more about luck in B2B if you're just starting out, but again, I know people who can consistently sell anything that makes sense to the customers. They had to get lucky a lot at the beginning, but they went out, met people, pitched, and did it again and again. Do that for enough years and you build a network wide enough to just send a few messages and get clients immediately.

It's just numbers - there is a likelihood you'll meet a big client ready to buy, a likelihood you'll meet an investor today. It's about putting yourself out continuously, every day, to increase the odds you get lucky.

How many cold calls with prospective customers do you have daily? How often do you talk to people who might be interested on LinkedIn or other professional forums/social networks? How often do you attend in-person professional/networking events, conferences, tech talks? If you're not doing that at least few times a week, your odds are very low.

They shouldn't get exceptions. There shouldn't be so many laws and regulations that result in EU being so behind economy-, success- and investment-wise.

No, that's not true. There are plenty of stable market capitalization, dividend-generating public companies. Their cap-to-EBITDA ratio is much smaller, but that doesn't change the fact.

Of course everybody expects the company to take advantage of opportunities - but it has to make economical sense. Nobody wants their company to try to grow so hard the whole company crashes.

Microsoft has massive government contracts in literally every EU country. US is an ally, not antagonist/enemy.

The EU doesn't invest, the EU provides subsidies with many strings attached. One of the strings usually is "can't be used to pay shareholders" (as in wages, not just dividends). Also, the subsidies are usually provided after the fact (e.g. a project is completed) and you need a loan to actually do the project. That's a risk, and banks don't like providing loans to small companies without predictable cashflow; they would do it only if a shareholder with enough assets personally underwrites it - another huge risk, now a startup can destroy your whole life.

If you meant the investors of EU - please show me where you got the data, because the official EU data suggest otherwise. People simply aren't that rich around here, which is a downstream effect of the much slower, smaller economy.

Who said infinite? Startup founders that got investments have designed the exit points based on market conditions, and nobody would trust "infinite". It's just like stock investments (unless you "invest" based on feelings, of course) - you calculate the risk, the potential, and then you decide. Nobody reasonable puts "infinite growth" into their Excel sheets.

And yes, growing until that exit point is a lot of work - so it makes total sense people want an exit at some point.

The US investors just have so much more disposable cash they can risk. EU investors are looking for safety because losing 100M EUR means they lost literally everything. Their "risky volatile investments" part of the portfolio is 1-5M EUR in total, usually even less - and split that between at least 3-10 startups. And there's much less people with money overall, so you can't raise large enough VC funds.

The usual EU investor is simply going to buy some real estate instead of participating in VC funds - still great returns, very low risk. The more progressive ones will maybe try some real estate development projects. No need to think about this software thing. The angel investors I met with that had portfolios of 5-20M EUR wanted to invest 20-50K EUR into our startup, definitely not more.

Because sustaining is a job, and it's a very hard job. The shareholders might not like that job or want to do a different one, or they just can't do it. Or the market is going down, but someone could use the IP/assets/team.

385M USD is way too much for EU investors. They usually invest 10x-100x less. So the alternative without US investors would be to have no startup of this kind - great job, that will really help EU grow!

Few million dollars split by how many people? A small startup that provided a decent exit for me was sold for 50M EUR. I got 100K from that - the company had over 1000 shareholders. That's not really life changing amount of money, was barely enough to get a mortgage for my small apartment (30% of the price).

BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's just grow I guess".

Perhaps the founders want to remain there and grow, perhaps they want to focus on something else or retire. Perhaps the plan always was to sell after X years - I don't see anything wrong about that, still better to innovate&sell than just buy stock&sell IMHO.

You can't attract investors if they can't sell in case the investment is successful. This is severely limiting and a terrible situation to be in - especially if you already have investors, who might demand their money back from you - way before your profits could cover it.

And the worst thing that might happen - you design a startup to be acquired by Microsoft/Apple/Google and then EU comes and says no. WTF?