The self-described "startup community" hasn't produced much of any value to me in a really long time. Dropbox-like things are somewhat useful, but that started in 2007 or so and the one I actually use in maybe 2011 or so.
I just took a look at yclist.com, which ends in 2019. Noticed only a few that I've ever heard of and none that I use. Possibly there are some since then but I sort of doubt it.
There are a couple of things that started later than say, 2015 that I actually use but none that come immediately to mind came out of the "startup community."
There are some others, like Stripe, from which I probably benefit somewhat indirectly, but even that dates back to 2010.
So yeah, for me, the SV "startup community" has been a wasteland for a long time. There are probably a few things that I'm not thinking of at the moment, but the fact that they don't come to mind suggests that they just aren't very important.
To be fair, there are probably quite a few useful startups hidden in the B2B world, especially given how much accepted startup strategy appears to have shifted to focusing on that segment.
This is true, but as far as I can tell, does not benefit me much. That's why I mentioned Stripe as something that probably does benefit me indirectly.
But a lot of the YC companies in particular seem to be making software I don't care about to sell to other companies making other software I don't care about to sell to other companies making other software I don't care about, and so on. The benefit to me of all this activity seems to be so close to zero that the difference doesn't matter.
I think the most important self-driving car company is Waymo, apparently founded as the Stanford Self-Driving Car Team in 2004, somehow became the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, the renamed Waymo in 2016.
All that is pretty long ago now and doesn't really have much connection to the SV "startup community" (Google ceased being meaningfully described as a "startup" a long, long time ago).
And anyway, I don't care about self-driving cars. Don't have one, don't particularly want one.
The direct benefits to me of OpenAI are nearly negligible. I use it (and others) now and then for various things but if it disappeared tomorrow, my life and work would not be meaningfully impacted.
it is because during from 2004/2005 on, it was seen a way to get rich quick to "just found something" and try it to sell:
the "early days" where driven by engineers, tech people, technicians - then the MBA crowd joined and funding became a "pipeline processed thing" to get tons of money quickly.
Why do you need a community? Build the thing, and then launch the thing by talking to prospective customers. If you're building a SaaS, you don't need funding if you keep working a day job and build your product slowly.
The clever people are still doing good work, they're just doing so quietly.
Big money has sucked the life out of it. It’s just a returns game, there’s less care for changing the world.
I do know many funds and people working to build community and startups that actually help people but it’s an uphill battle because it’s not as sexy and the returns aren’t as immediate.
> Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist.
Not all though but to me, I okay, I am mentioning this a lot nowadays but I am in high school and this is relevant.
When I first lets say wanted to do a startup, my idea was that people would invest in me for me to grow and then I can sell it really later after 15 years of working or sorts to have financial freedom.
I wanted to build things that could make profit for 15 years and be something that could've needed capital to expand the growth just like any other business.
Just because it is in coding/tech and its spicy right now doesn't make the principles of sound business go away.
Yet, the more time I invested in here / seeing YC, it seems that the story is about hype/growth/operating at a loss knowing things aren't sustainable/building wrappers.
Only to sell them at insane profits to somebody later on while the company never made a single profit or something while hiring many people...
What can I say, its just something that I can understand if someone is doing and there might be companies that have this fundamental but untill I find something like that, I am pretty sure not gonna just go and paste AI sticker in somethings as some other people are doing right now...
Its a matter of moral backbone. I can't charge my investor wrong knowing that my project doesn't have potential or sorts and its an hype thing... ,Idk. There are a lot of systemic issues in the whole world that we have to think through to discover how we got here.
> And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Man this is something that I grapple with a lott, we must do something to survive and so most of us work a dead end job even though we can be really passionate about something and so there's definitely that which I resonate with a lot.
I feel you. Disconnect for a while, touch grass, be the change you want to see, maybe explore parts of the internet that are less “startup” focused and more hacker focused?
Everyone's panicking about "AI features" being bolted onto products like it's 2010 and we're adding social login buttons. That's not the bubble. The bubble is the assumption that current software companies have defensibility.
Here's the thing: we're not adding AI to products. We're removing the need for most products entirely.
Nobody shipped without search after Google. But search was an enhancement—it made existing software better. AI is a solvent. It dissolves the economic moat that justified building the software in the first place.
YC's entire thesis rests on startups capturing value during the window between "this problem is painful" and "an incumbent solves it." But what happens when that window collapses to zero? When any reasonably clever person can get Claude or GPT to generate a bespoke solution to their specific problem in 20 minutes?
I'm watching food service managers—people who optimize labor, inventory, and customer flow in real-time—get told they can't build software. That's a lie we told ourselves to justify $150k engineer salaries and $10M seed rounds. Those managers have exactly the cognitive toolkit needed. They just didn't know C++.
In three years, they won't need to.
The SaaS model assumes friction. It assumes most people can't build the thing themselves, so they'll pay you $50/month forever. Coding AI doesn't make software easier to build—it makes the *act of building* indistinguishable from the *act of using*.
You don't need a project management tool with 600 features. You need to tell your computer what you're trying to coordinate. You don't need Photoshop's menus. You need to describe what you want the image to convey.
Every software company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush is missing that they're about to get disintermediated by the prospectors themselves. The cloud was never about technical superiority—it was about control and recurring revenue. What happens when capable models run locally and people can spin up exactly what they need?
VCs are investing in moats that evaporate the moment non-engineers realize they don't need us anymore. Network effects, switching costs, proprietary data—all predicated on software remaining expensive to create.
It's not.
The actual bubble is venture capital itself. You can't invest in defensibility that doesn't exist. And you can't charge rent on the gap between intention and execution when that gap is closing.
We're not in an AI bubble. We're watching the software bubble pop in slow motion.
If want your claiming is correct, it goes for nearly every profession.
Why do I need a lawyer if I can just get the AI to do it all for me? Filings, briefs, legal arguments etc. are all just output generated from specific inputs after all.
Why do I need to go to a doctor if I can just have AI diagnose, and eventually even run tests and then operate?
Why would I need artists / marketers for whatever my product, the magical AI can just do it all.
It could be we're headed down this road, but I don't see how software is somehow special in that its the only thing AI can do competently
The fun part is what looks like the core assumption here, that the current AI thing will actually work, doesn't even need to be true; it just needs enough people to believe it for the negative effects of it to become true.
Even without AI the software industry is not in a good state for a range of reasons. The big tech companies barely sell software - it's custom software operated to perform some other much stickier function, but the value is not in the software per se beyond it enabling selling the other thing.
This - unfortunately - goes for a lot of domains. Things that you used to be able to make a career out of now have a shelf life of a few years, sometimes less than that. This time compression is not just upsetting the VC world, it is upsetting just about everything in high tech societies.
I don’t know how you can claim all this when ai is nondeterministic and hallucinates. Menu based software is merely a way to trigger a function, the same function, every time you want to run it. Ai in its current incarnation cannot even do that.
> I don’t know how you can claim all this when ai is nondeterministic and hallucinates.
It's so bad. I was thinking that it would at least replace people whose job is largely to give their worthless opinions, but it won't even do that. Those people's real job is often to add head count, to give your uncle's kid a job or to be fired when things go wrong. AI can't do any of that, it just generates the worthless opinions. Now the idiot won't even have to imitate the verbiage they sort-of heard in college; they're the ones that are using AI the most, to bullshit for them.
It's good for helping you think through stuff you're thinking about by repeating back to you in different words (and getting even that wrong often, forcing you to clarify.) It's horrifically bad at finding or following references, reasoning, or coming up with anything new.
It's not eating software, it's barely even touching software, other than being shoveled into it randomly. The obvious proof that AI is bad is that there are actual geniuses who came up with the algorithms to speed up, parallelize and to bias in a way that makes them seem more productive and creative. LLMs don't seem to be helping amazing minds like that improve AI itself. If LLMs were even going to be fertile, that pairing would be a semi-singularity even if these exceptional humans couldn't be taken out of the loop. My bet is that they don't help at all.
Yeah, having to type out, or even speak "rotate this by 90 degrees about the Z axis" would get annoying fairly quick. Not to mention the inference is probably going to consume several seconds.
Blender user, or probably any other, would be able to pull that with a mouse click, followed by a few keystrokes. Bam, done.
Now something time consuming like UV-unrolling, sure go ahead and incorporate AI. But I'd bet it would need quite a bit of tweaking for a "pro" job, although of course thats not always necessary
The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore.
Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist.
YC has became like a resume builder.
And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Maybe it's just me not being able to not get out of the daily job schedule and taking the piss out.