PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view.
In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now.
The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
Waterfall means designing and building everything before rolling it out to users. Researching a problem before you start tackling it is just general good advice. You can be more effective while moving fast and breaking things while still taking some time to know where to move and what is ok vs not ok to break.
Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
You miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand.
By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.
In removing junior developers, leaving only senior developers, wouldn't that reduce supply, making the price go up, not down? It's been a while since Econ 101 for me though.
The author misses the forest for the trees. He's accurately articulating the current state of tools he's using but isn't acknowledging or extrapolating the next derivative I.e the rate of improvement of these tools.
That being said, everything is overvalued and a lot of this is ridiculous.
> He's accurately articulating the current state of tools he's using but isn't acknowledging or extrapolating the next derivative
Extrapolation would reasonably show that they're reaching an asymptote, graph cost vs improvement on a chart; you'll see that they are not proportional.
- The improvements from each subsequent model have also plateau-ed, with even regressions being noticeable
- The biggest players are so wildly unprofitable that they are already trying to change their plans or squeeze their current fanbase and raise their rates
They have stopped improving to match for the increase of the rate their costs and benefits. It's simple mathematics, improvements in efficiency don't match the increases in costs and the fact that they are extremely unprofitable, and all that data points to a bubble.
It's one of the most obvious bubbles if I have ever seen one, propped only by vibes and X-posts and Sama's promise that AGI is just around the corner, just inject a couple trillion more, trust me bro. All that for a fancy autocomplete.
This entire post smells like someone who's salty and trying not to face reality. I might not even disagree entirely with what's being stated here but the framing is just clearly wrong
Data engineering completely automated by a startups technology. This dataset sells for hundreds of thousands a year and can be fully cleansed and prepared from raw data purely with AI.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.