rexreed

Don't take any sort of business advice from VCs. They aren't even competent at running their own business, which is a financial play, not an operational business building and selling products or services. 90% of VC firms don't provide a net positive return to their own investors. That should tell you something. Their advice is self-serving to help inflate your equity value and has nothing to do with your current or future business.

I don't feel bad for VCs. Venture capital has turned the old style of startup entrepreneurship into a financial hustle of Startupism that is about trading equity value and not about venture creation. Maybe it always was about that, but at least in the 1960s-early 2010s it seemed at least somewhat more about business and value creation. Now it all just seems like a financial hustle. I hope we see VC become the minority way that businesses are built and financed as it used to be in the tech industry.

SV is so SV-centric that people in SV can only call SV "SV" and assume everyone outside SV knows what they are talking about.

And yet Microsoft is still ... Microsoft. Oracle is still Oracle. Whatever you think of them, they didn't decide to rebrand their whole company to go all-in on something that ended up not being that strategic. And no one can say they haven't been chasing that next thing.

If Google is slowly dying, then Meta is quickly dying. I still never understood the hard reframe of their company to the Metaverse. Why was it so important that they had to pivot the whole brand? And now AI is here and they're 20 steps behind. But then again, everyone says the best way to test your brand on the market is to buy Meta ads so what do I know. I guess they're just the Yahoo of the 2020s.

The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.

You can disable all cloud models in your Ollama settings if you just want all local. For cloud you don't have to use the cloud models unless you explicitly request.

Why are you looking to move off Ollama? Just curious because I'm using Ollama and the cloud models (Kimi 2.5 and Minimax 2.7) which I'm having lots of good success with.

Yeah and a lot of these are small only temporarily. Many of these startups are following the grow-at-all-costs VC philosophy that doesn't optimize for small team size. So I'm trying to find those alternate stories. Much harder to find, so when I see the post like this of OP's, I get excited. Hard to find stories of teams that are small by intent, but looking to scale big.

I'm looking for companies that are small by intent, but also looking to scale sustainably and grow beyond the capabilities of a single person. There are a lot of small businesses / solopreneurs / freelancers who work enough to get by or do a few hundred $K as a salary replacement, but aren't looking to build anything bigger. A lot of those companies also go by the wayside when the founder retires, gets hired, or something happens. And there's already a lot of content and sources for those types of solopreneur / single founder freelancers / side hustle type businesses.

I'm looking for the other stories of small teams scaling big. I'm basically separating side-hustles and solopreneurs as freelancers from a more sustainable business. Revenue is a cutoff as a way to differentiate, but doesn't have to be the only one.

For sure however, a team of 5 doing $20M implies something significant is happening at scale versus a solopreneur making what would otherwise be salary-replacement level money. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love solopreneurship. Just trying to find those other stories, which are much harder to find.

Would love to learn more about your approach to managing a small team and getting high scale. What is the best way to reach out?