Stop raising money. Each time you do that you increase the pressure on the site to make more money to earn the valuation. If the company is valued at $6B today then it probably needs to get to at least $18B valuation in two years. How? By trying to extract even more money from the users.
I couldn't agree more. We need to build companies that are sustainable and stable, it's almost as if its a lost concept - What's wrong with a profitable company with no growth? Most companies shoot themselves in the foot and die while growing.
Hey, I guess its like a forest - a tree falls down and small seedlings take up the space. Ah, the endless cycle of human struggle.
I just watched a video on Apple’s “cash problem”, with one of the video creators core point that “people expect the stock price to go up, and that can’t happen unless Apple does something with that cash and makes more with it!”.
Got me thinking: isn’t one of the core premises of investing that you’re purchasing ownership of cash flow? Is the ideal company one that it’s never profitable because it so perfectly allocated its money to never return a dime, but always to reinvest in itself? There’s a time and a place for re investment, but returning profit to investors is marginalized these days.
Apple probably doesn’t have a money problem, the culture does. Startups don’t sell growth except secondarily, they sell profit.
AAPL pays a dividend and has a substantial buyback program. Their cash problem, if you want to call it that, is that they bring in so much revenue with nice margins that it is impossible to allocate it all. So they return some value back to shareholders through divvies and buybacks, spend what is reasonable on R&D, and keep cash on hand for flexibility. They don't seem that big on M&A, but that is probably a good thing (looking at Cisco for example)
It's a shame that the third way to spend the money is totally forgotten now apparently. Yes you can re-invest, give back to shareholders, but why not increase wages?
I joined clubhouse (the audio-only app) recently and while there is a lot of VCs and marketing nonsense there taking up the app I've also found quite a few rooms full of people who are working on sustainable organizations. start.coop is one example and others just generally talking about social enterprises or how to use tech to keep businesses on a slow and steady growth.
Good luck extricating it from your life. There’s too much utility. I’ve even come back around to Twitter after being off for 5 years. Tremendous value in having a curated list there.
> I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon
I have been nervously awaiting this day as well, but I just realized something in the context of HN.
Say reddit kicked off Apollo and all the apps... What an opportunity to make a reddit API clone & then site! Apollo alone has many loving users, some of whom would go with Christian to a new backend. Maybe all the apps would agree on one to migrate to? I wonder if this is already part of reddit's calculus when considering kicking the 3rd parties.
It's too late. Once you've raised a little, your investors want a return on investment, so you raise more, allowing (some of) them to exit without making a loss. Rinse and repeat.
