We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.”
The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet.
We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain.
The escape hatch is always subscription revenue.
It’s true you can build a unique business on unique values for a unique community.
But it’s a long slog in the MicroSaaS world where anyone can & many will straight up copy you - forever.
X.com is probably the only & last experiment on whether switching to subscription rev is achievable at scale. Looks pretty clear so far that it’s not.
This might seem a negative outlook, but it could be quite positive if founders know & accept it.
The secret is out now that, mostly, founders make the same amount of money in the same amount of time whether they go the VC or bootstrapped route (when it’s a winning business).
There will always be opportunities for finance-backed cartel-busting mega runs.
But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays.
Once subscription revenue is enough, scare and shame won't work and politics won't have anything to do with the future of the business.
But equally “politics” doesn’t explain the drip in brand value, either. The FIFA World Cup has _dreadful_ politics, advertisers don’t care because it’s still a great brand with a huge reach.
Musk is rich and connected enough to be able to ignore commercial reality for a basically unlimited amount of time, but I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.
I think reach was falling because of political pressure.
> I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.
I was arguing that the goal of a company is to generate profit. That should be the goal. If business owners do that or don't, it's up to them. And I am not arguing that Musk does a good thing if he doesn't have the profit as the objective.
You say a company should have the goal of generating profit. According to what moral imperative?
According to market economy, not to a moral imperative.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
I’ll appreciate his politics are way to the left of yours and he’s making this point for a left wing audience, but the TL;DR is: a lot of what you’re perceiving as politics here is literally the market economy acting to maximise profit.
His perspective is that _left-wing_ people shouldn’t be conned into thinking this is about anything other than profit maximisation.