Anil DashI’m eavesdropping (well, they’re so loud I can’t ignore them) on two young startup guys at this coffee shop, a version of a conversation I’ve heard a million times. But what’s striking vs 10 or 15 years ago is… almost nothing they’re talking about is the tech. Everything is financial engineering and how to hustle the ecosystem. Nothing about products or even markets and competition, all fussing about banks and crypto and VCs. Explains a lot about my fatigue over the industry in general.
Cassandrich@anildash At least maybe they'll stop ruining actual tech in their quest to scam people...
John Minnihan@anildash two words:
CROP
DUSTING
Andrew Benedict-Nelson@anildash "Remember back when this was fun?" is a question I'm hearing from a lot of people lately.
prozacchiwawa@anildash some of the weirded conversations i've had in startup life are over product market fit and "GTM plans" taking the "product" as a pure abstraction (literally 100% undefined at that point). I don't know if i'm crazy or others are but it's difficult to wrap my head around putting dates on a GTM plan before making something.
Jason Kottke@anildash Actually thinking about the team you're building or the people you're serving is at best a third-tier concern these days.
Anthony Sorace@jkottke @anildash Which is so bizarre. Maybe it’s from my Bell Labs exposure, where half the research model seemed to be “throw a bunch of smart folks together and something cool will happen”, but if someone handed me a few million dollars I know the first few people I’d want to hire, and we’d figure out the rest from there. The people are everything.
Jeremy Burge@anildash yup, it’s not just a US thing, but it sure wears me down when I’m visiting and hearing those same convos
Dave Guarino@anildash This is actually why I’m somewhat excited about LLMs honestly. It’s one of the few core underlying shifts I’ve seen in… a decade? Far more work to get to safe translation to domains (but that’s good!)
Leonardo Di Ottio@allafarce @anildash There is some great trolling to be done by convincing the world that VCs will soon be replaced by AI.
D2@LeonardoDiOttio @allafarce @anildash (Looks at last ~5 yrs of vcs and the spiraling crashes of ‘successes’). I mean, is it really trolling if the idea has merit?
@InkomTech @allafarce @anildash You’d still be trolling all the breathless VCs who claim that ChatGPT will be able to perform open heart surgery by next month.
Matt
Andrew H – № 2025@anildash the circus is coming to town. Doesn’t matter how the animals or performers are doing. All the games are rigged and the only thing that matters is arriving on time and hustling the town then leaving before people get too angry.
Startups are a circus
Brian Dear@anildash This. So this.
Whenever I mentored startups and they started talking like that I cut them off and told them “tell me about your customers.”
And they’d look at me like a party pooper, and say “wut?”
And I’d suggest to them that the single most exciting story is the customer story and that they need to prepare three different customer stories. What each customer’s pain/need is, and why this hot startup has the solution. I urged them to have a customer focus. (Few listened, lol!)
Eric Lint@anildash There was an xkcd that stuck on this:
"I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at."
bodhidaveIt's a bit of an extension, perhaps, but I was encouraged in Zen retreats' work periods to get acquainted with my results-oriented thinking pattern.
While washing a window, for instance, when the bell sounds ending the work period, you stop. You stop ... whether you have "finished" the window or not.
The point isn't to finish — the point is to wash the window.
🙂 🙏
Elliot Betancourt
thisisaaronland
Ernie Smith@anildash I have noticed this in newsletters. There are people who are less interested in the product than the growth. Growth hackers want theirs. Auteurs get left behind.
Jake 
@anildash
Isn't that the way it's always been? I don't really think of any of the big "tech" companies as tech companies, except for maybe Apple. Google, Facebook, Amazon and their ilk are market manipulators. For most of my career I've heard people talk about becoming the next Amazon or similar. It's disheartening because Amazon's innovation was shutting down competition, not mail-order (Sears did that a hundred years before). This overheard conversation is just being more honest about the process.
Isn't that the way it's always been? I don't really think of any of the big "tech" companies as tech companies, except for maybe Apple. Google, Facebook, Amazon and their ilk are market manipulators. For most of my career I've heard people talk about becoming the next Amazon or similar. It's disheartening because Amazon's innovation was shutting down competition, not mail-order (Sears did that a hundred years before). This overheard conversation is just being more honest about the process.
👨🏻💻☕@anildash a few years back I decided that I can’t change the trajectory of our industry. At least not without being someone I’m not. But at the fringes I can try to help good folks who share my values and double down on living those values myself. Maybe a compromise but also freed me from an impossible responsibility.
@hunterwalk I think I'm in a similar place but have to largely disengage because it's so unhealthy to be around.
@anildash for sure. also, and i'm saying this for readers of this thread more so than for you, it's important to not think that ‘we were pure, the new folks are bad.’
Money (and ego, greed) has *always* been a part of SV/tech as have many of the other challenges we see today. That said, it does seem like something has tipped for many participants and role models.
Femme Malheureuse@anildash I'm old enough to remember this is what it sounded like just about the time Enron imploded.
I spoke then with hedge bros who were being told by their corporate overlords they wanted whatever it was that was making Enron successful, just get it. And they couldn't figure out what the secret sauce was, spent a hell of a lot of time on this.
The secret sauce was vaporware and corruption.
Trevor Flowers@anildash Yes. I left the tech biz to make physical things mostly because of this shift.
Uncle 6 🌁@anildash forty years ago they wouldn’t even have been on this coast, they’d be at Wharton getting ready to hustle junk bonds. It’s past time to flush the bank wanks out of tech, except this would take out most of the VC ecosystem with them.
jdtechie@anildash It does feel like a chunk of the startup scene has been replaced with guys just trying to make a quick buck and they'll move on to the next get-rich-quick plan as this field cools off. Just making a product people want and use feels almost quaint now.
ErosBlog Bacchus has moved!
Andrew Hinton@anildash I’m more and more convinced one thing digital tech and financialization have in common is they tend to get more abstract, disembodied, and solipsistic further away from embodied, flesh & blood needs & concerns, unless there are structural counterbalances in place
MDonaldson →change a few words here, and this also explains my fatigue with (and why I stepped back from) the music industry
NoHomers@anildash Ah so the bullshit artists have realized they can skip the pretense now. It's all about fleecing.
Steve YelvingtonProduct is an annoying cost center.
Dominic Hopton@anildash I've felt a similar feeling: https://mastodon.social/@grork/109988668608140897
jwz@anildash This was already the case in 1997 and that's why I sell beer.
Viss@jwz @anildash and im desperately trying to chat with zenefits support, because their handling of switching over from svb to a new bank has been abysmal and it seems like they wish to punish their customers. i get why folks want to 'plumb their own finance tubes'. just trying to run payroll is a nightmare.
Daniel Lakeland
Alan Bucknam@anildash startups are just another extractive industry sector at this point
Justin Pot@anildash This really gives words to my sense of exhaustion.
jimray@anildash It’s rare that has a day has passed in the past … decade? that the finacialization of tech hasn’t been made so readily apparent
In the crossfire between tech and finance
It was my birthday this weekend so, short of a quick joke, I didn’t follow the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank all that closely. Here’s a good rundown with a healthy dose of strident skepticism to boot. In the end, it seems like the post Dodd-Frank system worked as it should have (and had it not been kneecapped during the Trump administration, may not have been needed in the first place), with the depositors getting their money back, SVB’s leadership out of a job, and an admonishment from future-Senator Katie Porter.
Peter Butler@anildash Such is life in the “attention economy” — news coverage and buzz count much more than having an useful product or service.
I've stopped going to restaurants/cafes during the pandemic, and the biggest thing I miss is eavesdropping. 😢
paulwicker@anildash The world's perception of VC's, founders, and the whole startup culture has become so disconnected from reality that I'm not surprised that young founders are focused on those things.
Then again, when I was young I used to say some pretty stupid shit too. 😅
Son of a Sailor@anildash As an outsider, this is what depresses me about most startups. Move fast, make money, get bought out; the tech and its impact are secondary, just a means to an end.
Glyph@anildash the actual serious message here resonates with me deeply but since I read this post it has been rattling around in my brain that somewhere a sigma grindset bro is writing a corollary spiritual sequel to Cal Newport's work, "So Loud They Can't Ignore You"
The Jack of Sandwich@anildash I feel like the technology behind crypto currency could be interesting. Maybe there's some practical use for blockchain.
But I don't want to investigate the technology, because I don't want to be inundated by the scams that it enables.
But I don't want to investigate the technology, because I don't want to be inundated by the scams that it enables.
Pēteris Krišjānis@anildash because "profiting with other people money" is way how to actually get real estate.
Nick@anildash Pretty much every journey now is an incredible journey to acquisition or acquihire; so many startups whose customer base is other startups. (It also feels as though angel investors who’d built more durable things have gone away, but perhaps they were priced out.)
Frances_Larina 🏳️⚧️Almost like tech is just the latest tulips...
Josh Grant@anildash this has fully manifested in SV type companies that exist based based more on financial gymnastics than actual products (see Tesla for example)
Clark Breyman (he/him)@anildash I thought the Creamery closed :P
Sean Murthy@anildash Maybe they're not tech people. Just a possibility.
@smurthys Nah they definitely think of themselves as tech entrepreneurs.
Nicole ParsonsModern corporate life has gone beyond just the enshittification of products & services.
It's not just about watering down the seafood chowder to make more profit anymore.
It has morphed from a focus on making the best seafood chowder in the world to:
1. Figuring out how to monetize pictures of chowder
2. Conning banks into funding the sale of the smell of chowder
3. Convincing consumers that renting a chowder temporarily is better than permanently owning the right to the consumption ...
1/2
2/2
... of chowder
4. Lying about the contents of chowder
5. Enriching the 1% by promising a future chowder
6. Ignoring the consequences of everyone eating chowder every day as species go extinct
7. Promoting political gains by lying about a past "glorious lost" chowder
8. Getting voters to vote away their rights to eat or buy chowder when they want to "own the libs"
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈@Npars01 (every time I see that word)
The analogy is from a business book I read years ago. Cannot remember the name or author though.
Tiffany Lee Brown (she/they)@anildash It might also be interesting to consider that maybe someone else 10-15 years ago, sitting at a similar coffee shop, might've heard you and your bros talking about technology itself — and had a similar emotional response to how you're feeling about the $$ hustle. That sense of "How far removed are you guys from normal reality & real people?"
@magdalen I think people can tell when someone is making something out of a sincere interest in an idea vs just trying to hop on a lucrative bandwagon.
@anildash We can have sincere interests in projects that end up being of dubious benefit to society as a whole. You might've heard me having a similar coffeeshop conversation in like 1993 in the Bay Area, so I'm not pretending to be above all this! Just sayin'. One person's cool tech project that screws up thousands of real humans, loses them their jobs, etc., might be similar to another person's soulless VC pandering.