Thanks for the heads-up! HN Replies is up and running though, and notified me of a test comment I just made. If anyone would like to troubleshoot their subscription, feel free to email me.
Thanks for replying! Is the email necessary? It seems it's at least affecting 2-3 folks who replied here, so if you might be able to just look into email sending/delivery for us, that would be wonderful.
I sent you an email. Notification emails through the service seem to have stopped on my end on or around the 13th, if that helps, though I don’t post every day or get replies every day.
I see nothing wrong with this post. They're sharing something they've made and getting valuable, constructive feedback. I appreciate HN being one of few places that still happens at.
Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again.
I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
> Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free
Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.
If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.
It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.
I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.
For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.
Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.
Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.
Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
Even "taking their part of the money out" is not guaranteed. Again, it's a privately traded company, so there's no open market. You have to find someone willing to buy your shares from you and make a deal with them.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted. This is the principal-agent problem at work.
> Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted
Presumably, the real world is a bit more nuanced than that.
There is no reason why you cannot run a company for different motivations than "get as rich as possible" while still accepting investments from people whose sole motivation is "get as rich as possible". While difficult, it is possible to align people even when they have different motivations.
What you are describing is exactly the principal-agent problem, and it is a real problem at startups when a founder is truly motivated by something that the investors don't care about. You can run a company with different motivations than your investors, but only so long as you return the goods they want. If they see you not returning the goods and not caring about that fact, they will try to replace you. They will try to do that a lot faster if you demonstrate that you don't care about giving them a return than if you show that you do care.
Conversely, investors can be mission-driven or otherwise aligned with you on something other than "maximize my return," but those investors rarely give you the best price.
I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
A date picker widget I tossed on NPM 13 years ago gets 32,000 downloads per week. 510 a week is background activity, that's indexing bots or one org's CI system.
I totally agree. I thought about adding a paragraph about how it seems like even oracle themself doesn’t use it on production (cause otherwise it’d have probably more downloads due to developers, CI, you name it) but it is possible they use a internal npm proxy with a cache.
Anyway it’s laughable that this package is the reason they base their argument on.
Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.
Co-founder is just a marketing name and has no meaning in reality, actions do. Looking at this he provided in money which was likely to ruin his business by overspending it and greater minds prevailed in the end (I'm not saying paypal is a good thing or not). Why they made him CEO I cannot fathem but it has probably something to do with the bullying behaviour he is known for.
I've been named co-founder once but as soon as its usefulness ran out it got removed from the website (nothing else changed).
