Inside of every giant, growth-hacked company is a tiny, sustainable company that was utterly destroyed in the name of earning capitalists more money.
@shoutcacophony If there were a million tiny companies doing things like Pinboard, there'd be a market of companies to apply to. Toxic companies would have a hard time getting employees. With megalithic companies, it all comes down to which team and which manager you end up with, and that's rolling the dice.
But also, a huge amount of effort is wasted on scaling up (both tech and company size) to try to become a unicorn that could be better spent providing value to smaller userbases.
@gdorn Well, we agree on the second point, so it's a start 😂
Seriously, that's common ground. I hate it when execs turn good or goodish or something (depending on someone's perspective) companies into "No, that's plainly horrible" because they insist on scaling up
@gdorn And the tiny one probably had better service and/or products.
Startups spend a ton of money, effort and talent trying to scale up to become a unicorn, ultimately to make VCs money. The entire startup system is inefficient and wasteful, and it's a result of putting all focus on the derivative of value (stocks, IPOs, VC payoffs), instead of value (selling a product to customers).
@gdorn @Antanicus even worse is for the most part the only reason these companies go onto become Unicorns is the absurd amount of VC money that is being pumped into them. Take that away and their flimsy business models collapse like a stack of cards holding up a bowling ball.
@gdorn Which may or may not still be crap, but at least it wouldn't be *super epic poop global enterprises, destroyer of worlds* level crap
OTOH, small business owners can be pretty horrible as well -- more often than gets reported, at least. I do get what you're saying though