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Comment by esafak

10 hours ago

Would we? You can look at places with less funding and see how many software companies get off the ground.

11 comments

esafak

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embedding-shape  10 hours ago

> You can look at places with less funding

Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.

I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".

  • esafak  10 hours ago

    FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.

    • weiliddat  10 hours ago

      That sounds like more sign of recent times.

      FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

      4 replies →

    • TheTaytay  5 hours ago

      I don’t know why you are being downvoted. I mean, I guess I do, but sheesh, they are really shooting the messenger here. Maybe they are looking for more nuance: a lot of software is/was written by people working at…

      I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.

CodingJeebus  10 hours ago

I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.

They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.

Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.