Comment by JustExAWS
2 days ago
Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about a dozen have gone public, the rest are either dead, zombies or got acquired. These are all acquisition plays.
Even the ones that have gone public haven’t done that well in aggregate.
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
Dropbox was solving a hard infrastructure problem at scale. These companies are just making some API calls to a model.
If an established company in any of these verticals - not necessarily BigTech - see an opportunity, they are either going to throw a few engineers at the problem and add it as a feature or hire a company like the one I work for and we are going to knock out an implementation in a few months.
The one YC company I mentioned above is expecting to have their product written by one “full stack engineer” that they are only willing to pay $150K for. How difficult can it be?
> These are all acquisition plays.
Which seems fine? VC money gets thrown at a problem, the problem may or may not get solved by a particular team, but a company gets created, some people do some work, some people make money, others don't. I don't get it. Are you saying no one should bother doing anything because someone else is already doing it or that it's not difficult so why try?
I’m pushing back against this…
> Not every company needs to be Apple
These aren’t people deciding to build “companies” - ie create a product that people want and turn a profit. They are a legal Ponzi scheme.