Comment by asdff
6 hours ago
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.
I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process
No but Anthropic and OpenAI are very much trying to use their positions to destroy everyone's ability to do things without their product, make AI essential, and then jack prices. Thats the only way this becomes profitable.
It's not about Stainless, it's about Anthropic.
Now Uber is profitable what stops a taxi from just competing again, forcing Uber to have to be unprofitable again?
Skill issue. Taxi companies aren't able to innovate and adapt and improve, despite the competition from Uber, preferring instead to use lobbying and regulations too survive in a post-Uber world.
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I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.
This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.
and this is why i use pi.dev and hotswap models and have no reliance on a single provider
Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
Exactly. The goal of any VC by definition is to return a positive return on investment. I guess you might have a handful of exceptions, funds that are environmentally conscious, but profit remains paramount.
I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
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You forgot this: "trust me bro".