> More generally, building a profitable, sustainable organization of human beings is intrinsically useful and interesting. This last part is less a reply to your post and more a response to a cynical (in my opinion) tone throughout this discussion.
I do understand this view, and I share it to some extent. It's easy to be cynical and it's hard to try to make things work. I understand that far more now in my old age than I did back in the fuckedcompany.com days, for example.
With that said, I think people who espouse this view can be a little oblivious to the downsides of frivolous investment bubbles in tech. If you take a million dollars of investment and do something like take cases of wine, open the bottles and pour it into little glass size vials, and mail it to people for a couple months before realizing that service is not really useful to anyone, then that's a real life tragedy.
Asset bubbles are bad and have real life consequences.
Those million dollars belong to someone, often someone's retirement fund or similar. That million dollars can help people. It can help them directly, by giving to those in need, or more relevantly, it can support business ideas that aren't frivolous, people who aren't privileged graduates of prestigious colleges or connected to hot incubators.
Maybe a system that is funding that idea but leaving so many prospective entrepreneurs and ideas completely out of the system, is somewhat broken. Maybe we're allowed to notice it and find it problematic if we want to.
Maybe we can say hey this is disappointing because it is.
I agree with most of this and probably shouldn't have included that last bit because I see that it might indicate otherwise and shift focus from what I think is a more important point.
I guess our disagreement is that I'm not ready to label the wine delivery company as frivolous. It provides, of course, a purely luxury product, but I'm not sure that providing (or investing in) a purely luxury product is ethically or morally deficient or frivolous. If you add in that YC funds many extremely risky companies with highly humanitarian, philanthropic, etc goals, I think it becomes even more difficult to look at specific investments and say "what a shame."
Frivolous or not, though, is it sustainably profitable? I'm not convinced that it could be, and I think that that's the core of CPLX's doubt as well.
A silly but profitable project can fund basic research that would be too expensive on its own; but a project that's neither particularly valuable in its own right, nor able to fund others, isn't good for very much.
(Old-style luxury goods also provide work for artisans and keep traditional knowledge alive, but I'm not convinced that that element is present here either.)
I disagree. I think CPLX is disappointed not because he thinks YC is picking losers, but because, in his opinion, YC isn't accounting for certain ethical, moral, humanitarian, philanthropic, etc (I'm not sure what the correct word is) ideals when it makes its picks. Or maybe: taking risks on inherently frivolous ventures in lieu of more valuable ones is disappointing. Weighing in on the accuracy of these sentiments does make for interesting discussion.
I think "YC says investment X is +EV, I say it's -EV" is usually an uninteresting statement unless it's made outside of the context of ROI and profitability. I know the HN crowd is well-informed and knowledgeable, which is why the forums are so interesting, but an extremely small number of us are qualified to critique YC's investments in terms of financial ROI.
So my initial response was w.r.t the sentiment that these companies are frivolous, regardless of whether they're profitable. If you're correct, then I must have missed CPLX's point.
box-a-month clubs are a pretty solid business model, if you can do it. I floated around a business subreddit, and a number of people had quite a solid side business doing box-a-month setups.
Further, I am very very tempted by the whisky subscription deal; I'm just not enough of a whisky drinker to bite the bullet.
I do understand this view, and I share it to some extent. It's easy to be cynical and it's hard to try to make things work. I understand that far more now in my old age than I did back in the fuckedcompany.com days, for example.
With that said, I think people who espouse this view can be a little oblivious to the downsides of frivolous investment bubbles in tech. If you take a million dollars of investment and do something like take cases of wine, open the bottles and pour it into little glass size vials, and mail it to people for a couple months before realizing that service is not really useful to anyone, then that's a real life tragedy.
Asset bubbles are bad and have real life consequences.
Those million dollars belong to someone, often someone's retirement fund or similar. That million dollars can help people. It can help them directly, by giving to those in need, or more relevantly, it can support business ideas that aren't frivolous, people who aren't privileged graduates of prestigious colleges or connected to hot incubators.
Maybe a system that is funding that idea but leaving so many prospective entrepreneurs and ideas completely out of the system, is somewhat broken. Maybe we're allowed to notice it and find it problematic if we want to.
Maybe we can say hey this is disappointing because it is.