diolpah

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

My understanding of the "civility" standard is whether I would say it in person. My comments do pass this test.

This is Hacker News, where everything anointed by Larry and Sergei is to be revered and worshiped by all, forever and ever, amen.

Spot on. It's different this time.

Sure, it surprised us all when revenues and earnings turned out to actually matter in 2000, but it's 2011 now, man, and the future's so bright I've got to wear shades! The fact that I can download 14,511 apps that allow you to share photos of your cats is the only indication you need that we're living in the post-earnings era.

Making money is for squares. As long as you can line up that Series P round, the party's still on, man. Rock it, don't block it.

What exactly do you mean by "large customers"? We run several million dollars worth of credit card transactions per year( through cybersource and authorize.net right now ), and we pay at or near the wholesale interchange rate.

Even so, our accounting department still can't fully untangle the mess of foreign transfer and conversion fees, float-related costs, gateway fees, amex vs visa discount rate differentials, pci compliance service fees, and all the other horrible shit that Stripe eats for you, in order to give me a straight answer as to whether or not we currently pay more or less than 0.30 + 2.9%.

This is not a hit on our accountants, cybersource, stripe, or our merchant bank - just making the point that it's not so easy to state categorically that Stripe's fees will turn off somewhat larger volume customers.

"and really who isn't unhappy with the world right now?"

Most people who are capable of rationally evaluating the standards of living we currently enjoy versus that of any other point in human history usually aren't that unhappy with the world right now.

I say this in the general sense; of course at any given time, N individuals will be hitting the bottom of the barrel, but the barrel is getting shallower and shallower with each generation.

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes; apparently I'm factually incorrect, and the Global Human Development Index is actually declining?

I must be living in a different version of the United States than the author is. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of false optimistic outlook referred to here. Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Most people I talk to about our business are fairly realistic about the challenges we face, or progress thus far, etc.

It's been many years; We've been building this company fulltime since 2005, and on a part time basis since 2002. Bootstrapping is a slog, since you make expansionary investments from cash flow only.

Yes, I have a co-founder. In fact, he's the majority owner.

1000 years? That is a timeframe long enough to virtually guarantee the occurrence of the Singularity, so I would have to say Vinge/Kurzweil/Eliezer/Goertzel/De Garis, or whomever switches on the first self-modifying artificial general intelligence.

Ok, I will make a long story short, here.

My current business began as a side project many years ago. At first, I was building/managing the technical aspect of the business( website, integration, inventory systems, fulfillment systems, etc )remotely on an average basis of 20 hours per week. I say average because some weeks I did nothing, and other weeks I worked more than my "day job".

Growth was so strong that I ultimately made the decision to jump ship from my prior company and make my current company a fulltime endeavor. It was one of the most difficult decisions I've made in my life, as the cofounder of my prior company was very close.

During this time, we've grown from < $100k/y revenues to > $5mm ( making an effort to be vague here ), and still enjoying good growth. We are profitable and never took a dime of VC.

Hopefully this anecdote answers your question sufficiently.

I've been noticing this for about half a year now, particularly when googling for technical documentation.

Google is falling down on its core product, because they can..