Comment by stuaxo
5 years ago
Maybe I was just naïve but when I first started reading HN there was a lot of optimism around startups, maybe it's just the scales falling from our eyes, but it just seems to be one shitty deed after another - maybe the ecosystem was always poisonous ?
I’d say startup culture has changed quite a bit over the past 25 years. It was always highly competitive, of course, but it has IMO lost some of the honor and unspoken rules that it had. Employees are much more likely to be screwed out of any windfall when a liquidity event or IPO occurs, for example, and in fact even junior investors get pushed around too.
I honestly don’t know what has caused this change.
I feel like there's been a dramatic shift in sentiment since I started reading HN in 2010/2011 or so.
Having lived and worked through the last startup boom, it's easy to see why. Startups as a force in our economy and our culture were (once again) new and interesting and untested and exciting. You could make an app and be an "instant" millionaire! Money was flowing freely - the Bay Area office-warming parties from newly-minted Series A startups were a sight to behold.
Of course we (I) saw it all with rose-colored glasses; reality is always more complicated. Years have passed, and the plucky upstarts have become capitalist overlords. Many vested interests have worked hard over time to establish an alternate narrative where tech is ominous, unaccountable, and used for political ill. People are people and do shitty things, even at startups.
It's all just people and always has been, but for a time it really did feel special. Maybe I'm just old.
There are thousands of startups. Are you generalising some bad actors to characterise an entire segment?