fearless

Most of your examples have raised large amounts of VC funding. It's debatable whether they "need" the funding to success, but they certainly wanted it enough to eat the dilution.

The $1.2M revenue number looks completely made up by the article submitter. The article makes no mention of this or any other specific monthly revenue number.

I would expect a service like this to have very high churn as people export a list and leave, so the actual recurring revenue is likely much, much lower.

Path's failure is a fitting reminder of the likely outcome of making your key metrics friendships and moments rather than revenue. No doubt this is just one of many overfunded social apps that will fall into the abyss this year.

Isn't the one job of a startup CEO to keep customers happy? Pandering to VCs to the detriment of customers seems like a surefire can't miss recipe for failure. Compare the biggest exits with the biggest disasters and you'll find that's the main thing that differentiates them.

This seems like it could be a real business with a lot of traction, especially with the death of Rapportive. I wonder why the founders chose to throw it away and get jobs at LinkedIn.

How do you measure founder quality? Most startups have some amount of traction when they raise VC funding. Either hundreds of thousands of users or $1M or more in revenue, especially with the bar for Series A getting consistently higher. That would speak to the quality of founders increasesing over time, not decreasing.

The post makes some valid points, but this reads more like self promotion "content marketing" for her expensive make money online by bootstrapping course than an objective analysis.

Most likely $0. If you don't have any traction or investors, what makes you an attractive acquihire target? If it were so easy to throw together a few friends and make a million dollars via acquihire everyone would be doing it instead of applying for a job.

Acquihire is 30% about getting a team with proven ability to execute and 70% about paying back investors as a favor or a down payment on maintaining a good relationship with them. If your dream is really to get acquihired your best bet is to pull together enough traction to raise seed funding and then invest that money in hiring the best engineers possible before shopping it around to get acquired.

Welcome to the unfortunate reality of most internet businesses. The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style runaway success. The lifestyle entrepreneur myth is so pervasive on HN that the common mindset of non startup people is "Oh, I don't want to do the startup thing, I'll just build a steady slow growth business and make $10K a month". The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup. The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that you'll get 0%

Why do you think CryptoSeal failed? What are some lessons learned from running a YC startup for the past 3 years? It would be very interesting to see a postmortem.

One can't help but question the wisdom of hiring multiple sales people to sell merchants on accepting a method of payment that has no users.

It's not an entirely unreasonable heuristic. The supply of startup pitches is vastly greater than the demand for them. Investors have to filter somehow. Getting a first meeting with any VC is pretty easy, even for someone with no connections whatsoever. There are hundreds of possible paths you can take to get that intro. It's not a big stretch to assume that any entrepreneur with a good chance of success should be able to clear that low hurdle.

Building a successful startup is 1,000 times harder than hustling your way into a VC meeting. If you can't do the latter, it's pretty likely you won't be able to do the former.