Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn? We have had nearly 6 months of economic gloom. Theres has been lots of hypothetical talk of who will win in these turbulent economic times. Does anyone know of actual companies who have had some explosive growth in recent months? |
Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluation, and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway. The recent interest rate hikes also didn't seem to have nearly as much impact on the markets as everyone feared they would.
What exactly is everyone so scared about that we all seem to think the economy is headed for a major recession?
Working class is a good litmus of how the economy is doing vs S&P because speculation can ultimately make it look like everything is fine until it isn't
One thing I'm looking at is:
https://realtimeinequality.org/
And that's showing that for the first time in over a decade, the bottom half is seeing real wage/wealth gains, even after recent inflation. Am I missing something? Because your sentiment is the more common one.
Look at Facebook - they're currently the 8th most valuable company on the planet, but very few people really need what they provide, and most of their customers really don't like Facebook (and IG, etc.) and the way they know the company is manipulating them. Contrast that with a companies like Exxon or Amazon, which like them or not, produce products or services people need and want to buy. Ad markets would continue without them, and I'm already seeing companies shift marketing dollars away form digital given both poor results and waiting to see what happens. (And I'm in Austin, where things are relatively booming...)
My point is simply that 80% of what we as techies do could be eliminated tomorrow, and the world would go on. The 20% remaining could (painfully) keep things going through a downturn, especially if the alternative is unemployment.
If you think your company won't cut you loose if that 80% cost reduction becomes necessary due to depression-level forces, think again - you may not be so indispensable as you think, no matter your position - I've seen a couple of top-level thought leaders/innovators cut from local companies recently, something that didn't happen even in 2008! The reason is usually, "we're pulling back from investing in innovation and new product development." I've got a bad feeling about this...
It's been a while since I've been in that income bracket, but I don't remember ever being strong-armed into taking on unnecessary debt. What are you referring to here?
Man, this attitude is terrible. My life and all of my colleagues lives have been completely flipped upside down by this inflation. This comment just donwplaying it as a non-issue made me really angry. How out of touch are you? I can barely afford groceries anymore. And not the organic kind - the bottom basement price chopped discount kind.
You likely make significantly more than the nation average household and your job security and prospects are likely significantly higher.
I think the doom and gloom is a bit overblown too but who knows if tomorrow my company says xyz isnt looking good. Time for layoffs.
For example, the housing market seemed to still be hot even with increased rates, but that is because of the delay from sales to closings. Last month started showing decreases in sales in areas that were previously on fire. And anecdotally, listings in my area that would have sold in 1 day above the listed price which are currently still on market with multiple price cuts.
The other big factor that is lingering are the student loan repayments which have been deferred for now. That is a huge chunk of monthly expense if/when they are reinstated which will have an impact on discretionary spending, etc.
Back in 2018/2019, when I got curious and looked at what signals people look at for recessions, too low unemployment was one of them.
All the tech layoffs and hiring freezes that are happening. Whats the explanation for it if everything is fine and dandy.
The inflation issue is absolutely not solved. A single month from 9.1 -> 8.6 is FAR too soon for victory. I suspect the recent rally in the market comes from the assumption that the Fed will back off and that we have indeed already experienced peak inflation.
CPI of 8.6 is still unacceptable and my guess is we’re gonna see more rate hikes and QT than the markets expect. That’ll mean mortgage rates go up, companies will have more difficulty servicing debt…etc
We’re not in the clear quite yet!
People forget that 11/12th of the data for the yearly number already happened when they see the new number each month.
It’s not impossible that inflation is just 0% from here on out and yet it will still take a while for the yearly number to come down.
Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.
I'm not sure I agree with this, as inflation seems to have scared markets off of their peaks. I mean, they're not down that far, but I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation. Maybe this is true for some assets, but unless I'm missing something, markets in general do not seem to be feeding off of inflation in the way you're describing here.
But I wouldn't build my case on the provided numbers. Inflation numbers, unemployment numbers are not yesterday's numbers, as in they are not derived the same way. They mean exactly what they intended to mean, for managing expectations in the present.
Food and energy costs which are not considered in mainline inflation figures are still very high.
I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶I̶'̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶o̶p̶t̶i̶m̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶.̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶8̶.̶5̶%̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶-̶t̶o̶-̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶0̶.̶6̶%̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶.̶ ̶W̶e̶'̶d̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶e̶v̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶d̶r̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶c̶l̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶e̶a̶s̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶I̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶-̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶d̶,̶ ̶g̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶A̶l̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶i̶g̶n̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶e̶l̶e̶v̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶.̶
Your statement appears highly misleading, as if you don't understand the topic. Prices (in the U.S.) did not rise at all in July, so it's not clear what you could mean by "8.5% month-to-month" which, as stated, would be a spectacular and unprecedented rate. The month-over-month inflation in July was none. Prices rose 8.5% vs. year-ago.
> The recent interest rate hikes also didn't seem to have nearly as much impact on the markets as everyone feared they would.
Markets aren’t rational
Month over month inflation was 0 last month. We're obviously not out of the woods here, but consumer demand is dropping along with oil prices which seems to be leading the fed to believe that they may only need one more sub 1% hike in early fall. That would be much better than the doom scenarios everyone was talking about 6 months ago.
Amazon is running out of people willing to work in its warehouses; gig work gets old fast.
Low unemployment is unsustainable if it’s unfulfilling errand running.
There’s little net new invention going on in entrenched big tech; Bezos and co are riding high on mathematical inference by accountants; it’s a math scam being forced upon people who can’t “see” how he’s not really invented anything new; distributed computing under unified api; wow.
Capturing eyeballs is easy when the masses are oblivious; the biological quirk religion stumbled upon is being intentionally manipulated.
Except for nation state prestige, there’s little net new coming out of all these tech companies; writing apps and todo lists? Come on. Video games? 40+ years old. Better chat bots? Meh.
Story mode still rules; we’re iterating on the childhood nostalgia of 70-80s kids who also happen to be the early tech boom crowd; shock. Where is the net new? We’re getting faster with higher resolution.
Propping up the dollar in lock step with history. Which is why I believe all the pipe dreams about singularity and rockets to nowhere will never happen; kids growing up with these things will see sooner than the elders who were mesmerized by this stuff that it’s all “nuclear powered rocket cars” again.
Generational churn is what’s creating the rocky situation politically. Society will stabilize on a “new normal” as more of the 50+ crowd dies off. And the normal the 20-30s crowd wants is progressive; they’ve not lost their desire for political change as they age into their 30s like prior generations did as inequality still controls their life; prior generations lost their progressiveness as they bought houses and had families; something even 30 year olds cannot do; the elders have monopolized having a good life. The young want to be represented by like minded people and are just waiting out the resistance.
80% of last gens Fortune 500 are gone. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and open up economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
Same will happen as the elders with monopoly on politics die. Chip companies aren’t going anywhere, but HN is a filter bubble; there’s little dedication to these stupid software companies among the young; see FB use tanking among teens. No one I know under 40 cares about Metas verse, but it was on Today the other day! They’re gaming the clueless. The veil is pierced and frankly software as an industry deserves it; most is copy-paste work while everyone else grows their potatoes.
As a gamer, I find this is incredibly dismissive.
There's still tons of new ideas in games being explored. Factorio introduced the factory building genre in 2014, and we're still seeing new takes on it. Satisfactory made it first-person and beautiful. Dyson Sphere Program made it multi-planet and interstellar. Captain of Industry made destructible and moveable terrain.
The colony sim genre as we know it today did not exist 10 years ago. Now we have RimWorld, Banished, Oxygen Not Included, and more.
Even puzzle games continue to innovate. Baba is You is probably the most unique puzzle game I've ever seen, and then there's all the Zachtronics games...
So yeah...the product of "video games" might be 40+ years old, but it's silly to claim that there's nothing net new coming out.
The economy seems to be doing well in 2019 dollars. However you have to take account that almost 2x more money have been printed since then. And if you divide all our numbers by 2, we are already in an economic disaster.
I personally am long on robotics. The longer time horizon to market does mean ROI takes a hit in a high interest rate world. But I think the statement "the future will have more robots" is less controversial than some of the future scenarios that other companies are predicated upon.
Connecting up GitHub and watching it runs tests, build, and deploy without much configuration was very gratifying for me. I haven’t felt that feeling towards a tech product in years. It was so simple and easy, the same feeling I felt the first time I used Uber. The same feeling as our first Stripe transaction, or when we launched a stack on AWS.
[1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/climatetech-finance/inv... [2] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/this-is-hu...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/doppel-helps-nft-projects-...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/20/ai-based-startu...
https://www.theblock.co/post/159791/center-raises-11-million
Shameless plug - Doppel and Optic are direct competitors for what I've been building:
(We're the only solution that's publicly available).
Not to mention the various Know Your Customer, mixer detectors, etc such as Chainalysis, TRM Labs, etc.
I know crypto isn't popular on HN - given the amount of fraud, etc I've certainly jumped in here and elsewhere with plenty of comments and my thoughts elaborating on just how bad things are in the space (I do live and breathe it every day). My take is regardless of where you stand on crypto we should all be able to get behind solutions that are trying to clean up the space. Fact is it is here and (little) people are getting ripped off and scammed left and right.
On a side note (and probably worthy of an Ask HN) I've been self funding Tovera for a year and we have yet to land any investment after six months of trying and hundreds of hours (minimum) spent on the effort. Plenty to be said about the good and bad of where we are and how my motivation and mental health is doing. Our three direct competitors are all technically inferior and well behind us yet combined they've raised $27m... Classic story of the value of vision, pitch, and salesmanship vs tech.
Plenty of smaller companies in that space if you look for them.
Pipe, Arc.tech, etc.
That is a sign of a company that will survive in the long term since they are thriving even in these conditions.
The entire point of FTX is to profit from the unregulated crypto markets by front-running his clients with the FTX-Alameda combo and pump (to bring in new cows to milk) and dumping (to crash the markets and buy sinking companies on fire sale) the markets; while waving the altruism flag.
- Gov, especially cyber + analytics (we do graph ai + gpu viz stuff)
- Supply chain: A slowdown is happening, but COVID, regional conflicts, etc. makes needs for manufacturing etc. companies here super burning
- Cyber + fraud: The need hasn't gone away (more automated attacks every day!), though companies based around VC blitz and pushing their gaping tech + operational holes to acquirers are hurting as fewer people happy to give them free $
- Devops was hard and remains hard. Digital transformation is an ongoing process and still needs a lot of help.
This one
Having worked in ecommerce for a while now, I noticed back in 2008 that ecommerce flourishes when the economy goes sour. It's not strictly recession-proof- during the economic disruption, you will see separation of the wheat and the chaff, but new ecommerce technology that works gets supercharged.
A decade and a half ago saw the emergence of Magento, BigCommerce, and while Demandware (based on Intershop) had been around for a bit, they emerged from the recession with afterburners on full blast. Shopify would hit stride later, eating into Magento and Demandware's lunch around the time they each got bought up for billions of dollars by Adobe and Salesforce, respectively.
There were plenty of companies in the space that fell apart during the great recession too, but their talent moved on to the dominating players. You're seeing that happen during the last couple of years too. There have been some infamously rapid collapses - the implosion of Fast, Shopify's stock prices making a rapid return to normalcy. I strongly suspect you'll see other VC-backed 'disruptors' in the space fall apart. A newer 'headless' platform that talks a big talk recently put out a press release trumpeting a new deal that comically only listed former customers in the name-drop brag section of a press release, not a great look when you're the new kid on the block.
Commercetools is where enterprise companies go to get away from legacy ecommerce platforms like Oracle (RIP), Salesforce, SAP Hybris, and homegrown systems - but in the last year it has also increasingly brought on graduates from the Shopify Plus and BigCommerce ecosystems.
The startup I work for, Vivun, 4X'd our ARR over the course of our latest fiscal year and received a $75M Series C funding in May.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/vivun-is-digitizing-pre-sa...
btw, if anyone reading on HN is interested in joining a startup tackling the property management angle, hmu! my company helps manage 200k+ rental units across america and always interested in capable and enthusiastic folks to join.
Considering the current policies it seems like those companies should remain well funded for foreseeable future.
- There just isn't that much KYC-worthy commercial+retail transaction volume, and a lot that does exist is from just a handful of big exchanges etc. So there is some revenue here, but not enough for standalone co's at current ecosystem's level. The "real" KYC play is still largely investors speculating on a future years from now and propping these co's up.
- There was a lot of crypto startups needing their smart contracts vetted. Still some $ overhand from last 2-3 years where these are still happening. A bunch of crypto companies cratered, and we'll probably keep seeing that, so uncomfortable inbetween period for these auditors too.
- Two big areas growing are (a) gov are getting more into chasing this stuff down and (b) banks are warming up to crypto offerings. The former is real revenue for teams who know how to work with tricky gov entities, and the latter is POC $. I'm seeing some compliance stuff happening (similar to how Stripe does taxes for you know, imagine someone doing KYC for you accepting ETH), but again, tiny market that's really a speculation for who-knows-when.
It's pretty "easy" to hustle $Xm in services contracts, but big recurring revenue is not so clear cut due to the market.
Fight NFT Fraud sounds like a service for company buying/selling NFTs, and needs to stop attacks on their system and is actually slightly vague.
Seems like people can check if a specific NFT is stolen or improperly minted?
Lead with that. CarFax for NFT (but even more important)
Is that NFT Stolen? Check now.
Then after the submission box can go into more detail.
Yes, I'm glad the core sentiment and functionality comes across.
One of the biggest issues in the space (for Tovera and FNFTF) is that the crypto ecosystem is so sleazy no one in our targeted user/customer base (slightly sophisticated users and beyond) trusts anything or anyone - and rightfully so.
In reaching out on Twitter, etc getting anyone to engage with something like FNFTF to even upload a PNG/JPG is near impossible. Install a browser extension?!?! Yeah right. Our most common response is "Nice try, scammer".
This is why we have "Show me a Random Ape" and "What have other people searched" buttons. It's practically all anyone who visits the site uses because of the issues I mentioned. So that's why we try to lead with something above the fold.
It's a chicken/egg reputational issue for us. Granted all of this is the creator and collector space - the real customer is an NFT platform, marketplace, etc that would integrate us in the backend somewhere so a user that already trusts wherever they are would inherently trust us.
Well, for starters there's the proven collusion between big tech CEOs in the very recent past to keep wages suppressed... I "suppose" it could be coincidence that the FAANG execs all came out at the same time and made a big Kabuki dance about "everyone work harder or we'll fire you"... But my money is on the square that they are colluding with each other again... Because they already proved they will do that.
> I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation.
Look around more! We’ve witnessed the greatest bull market in history and It’s largely due to the government pouring trillions of dollars into securities. Look at returns on equity and real estate since QE started in ‘08. Poor people aren’t the ones benefiting off our insane 14 yr rally.
But another example that comes to mind (as someone who lives in that income bracket about half by choice and half not) are car repairs (you HAVE to pony up or you lose your job, so the question becomes 'borrow 1k or lose 100% of your income').
Oh, and any time childcare is fucked up for any reason. Kid can't go to daycare/school because they're sick for a week? Parents don't get PTO, so their only option is to eat a week's worth of wages, and since income in is close to or level with expenses out, that means making it up with debt.
The 'strong arming' comes in because society is set up to make those your only options. (versus having public transit to rely on, walkable cities, or cheap car rentals, for example).
High schoolers are still being told "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!", yet a high schooler certainly can't pay the $15K+ per year to get a degree, so they take out student loans.
And then, the same people who hounded them to get a degree then hound them when they beg for student loan forgiveness, telling them they shouldn't have taken out a loan they wouldn't be able to afford to pay back.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I started college in 1999. The day my freshmen year started, jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that were already 60 years old.
This argument is revisionist bunk, in other words. Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others, that some degrees lead to higher pay and that some don't. Everybody knows this. They know it today and they knew it in 1999 and they knew it in 1979 and I categorically reject this weird, revisionist insistence that nobody could possibly have known it or that 18-year-olds are hapless dopes without any agency or even the most basic understanding of how the world works.
No one is saying teenagers lack agency, but there is definitely a problem when an outsized number are making decisions that are detrimental to their long-term future
>Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others
This has only been made more extreme, but you've been checked out for at least 20 years apparently.
Now this is coming from, as I said, a person not in the space. Your users more sophisticated but still think language could be sharper.
If could already show last few NFTs searched for might be the best (yes always easy for person to suggest things they don't have to implement, ha)
YES - we're already building front-end support for more "wow" factor on various NFT statistics, recent searches, realtime newly minted NFTs, etc. I'm the furthest thing from a UI/UX person but I have faith in the team that we'll be able to certainly come up with something more engaging than what we have today (which isn't saying much)!
Thanks again!
*substitute with whatever staple you wish. I used bacon here since it's historically a working class' person's meat.
Government price data for bacon goes back to 1980.
PS - there are other price series about bacon, including regional prices:
NOW it's supply and demand, though.
Wealth started growing since about 2019 too.
But if you take loans in 2015 dollars and repay them in 2022 dollars, you are better off in terms of repayment by having a lot of inflation during that period. It doesn't matter what purpose you took the loan for.
Sometimes people just want entertainment and that's fine. Based on the OP's response to my comment, I wonder if they consider leisure time to be wasted time.
Why keep chucking real resources down the drain for Zachtronics? If you want logic puzzles there are simple paper books full of them.
This is peak entitlement; the future must cope with your leisure preferences. Not voting rights, or clean water; you are owed video games.
You would defend until the end your right to not sacrifice any scrap of figurative identity. How incredibly dismissive of future peoples entire existence.
Launch the nukes, Putin. If we’re just going to iterate like mindless dweebs into collapse of the species why not go out in a blaze of glory; that would truly be metal af
I’ve built game loops and models; I know how games work.
The suggestions you cherry picked still do not come with any fundamentally new technology behind them as it’s still a machine of known constraints.
Rockets to nowhere is nostalgia for the Spaceship. Cherry picked games are nostalgia for playing Super Mario. It’s all a huge waste of real resources, the real deficit we’re leaving the future, since the fiat money one is a shared hallucination detached from that material reality.
Part of the frustration I have with the game industry is taking themselves entirely too seriously.
It's like watching Dr Seuss search for some deeper meaning outside of simply entertaining and teaching children.
Why can't being entertaining be enough?
That website is arcane but the data is fantastic.
I'm kind of happy to go either way on this, but I think we're probably going to have to pick one. If an 18-year-old can't sign a contract, then surely they shouldn't be allowed the vote.
This will do absolutely nothing to prevent school shootings, and will have such a negligible effect on gun violence in general that I feel the Democrats are creating animosity across the aisle for no gain at all.
I won't pretend to know the solution to gun violence, but this certainly ain't it.
More like a couple hundred thousand years, not millions, but that's a moot point.
Humans went thousands of years without a lot of things. This is not a convincing argument.
> Why keep chucking real resources down the drain for Zachtronics? If you want logic puzzles there are simple paper books full of them.
False equivalency.
I could easily turn this around and ask why chuck resources on publishing puzzles on paper when I can do them digitally.
> This is peak entitlement; the future must cope with your leisure preferences.
Really? Enjoying spending my time on video games is "peak entitlement"?
> Not voting rights, or clean water; you are owed video games.
Textbook whataboutism.
> You would defend until the end your right to not sacrifice any scrap of figurative identity. How incredibly dismissive of future peoples entire existence.
Yes...I'm sure me playing a few rounds of Legion TD 2 or a couple hours of Final Fantasy is going to threaten the existence of the future.
> Launch the nukes, Putin. If we’re just going to iterate like mindless dweebs into collapse of the species why not go out in a blaze of glory; that would truly be metal af
You are either mentally ill, an extreme workaholic, or a troll. Please seek help.
What’s that? I’m not chanting the traditions the way you would? So I’m mentally ill? That’s some traditional values BS.
Peak entitlement; anyone who isn’t enabling your figurative identity is some sort of broken thing. Childish reasoning.
Paper and pencil don’t require nearly the same level of toxic waste and slave labor; so false equivalence.
You can’t say false equivalence and have it be true you have to actually quantify why their damage is the same; again childish logic.
Peak entitlement is that you aren’t giving a damn what video games cost everyone in real terms, you’re hung up on living in your bubble and expect billions of others to coddle your feelings like mommy and daddy did. But if you’re putting it out there you have no obligation to consider others sensibilities before your own; fuck yours too. Who cares about one of seven billion whose parameters are pretty similar to billions of others, since you like logic and stats so much.
Less than 13% of the public have greater than a bachelors. While polls show most Americans think it’s 35-40%. The world is not composed of as many like minds as you think. You’re outnumbered.
“Work” is a term defined in physical sciences; my biology “works” 24/7. I loath “job culture”. Hanging in a hammock by a river last week my imagination conjured up numerous story threads for a space opera. Video games are someone else’s imagination.