My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story(old.reddit.com) |
My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story(old.reddit.com) |
It's not the VCs' fault that OP failed at scaling his business. If you are getting VC funding you will need to be able to scale up.
(1) "I was told to hire a lot of people. Put fuel on the fire they said. Bring industry experts who can move the needle. All this BS you hear all day. All failed. I hired VPs and bloated my payroll. Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.” Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solution is to divide that area into 5 sub areas and hire someone for each of them to figure it out, etc. that’s their solution."
(2) "I ended up focusing my efforts on hiring and ramping up those VPs and dealing with their dumb ideas instead of focusing on my 3 core tenants: build, sell, and deliver."
A bunch of bourgeoisie over-educated idiots, usually with MBAs, who don't know how to do anything except take credit for work that other people do.
The story ends as you'd expect, we all got laid off and the founder was shitty.
The made sense.
They smelled good.
They made great leadership stories.
...but none of it actually mattered to the customer.
I've worked at a lot of startups. The worst of them were led by people who list things like "organization design" and "build and lead amazing teams" on their LinkedIn.
At the most dysfunctional company, the ex-FAANG CTO would take key job descriptions and add the requirement that they must have FAANG experience. This created a glass ceiling where the early employees, non of whom had FAANG backgrounds, were unable to be promoted. Instead, we got a lot of ex-FAANG VPs and Directors who didn't know how to function at a startup. They were told to lead teams of people who knew the business inside and out (because they built it!) yet they could barely function outside of a big company themselves. Every meeting would be a competition of stories about "At Microsoft we did this..." or "At Facebook we did that..." because playing the FAANG card was the only thing the CTO liked to hear.
The only non-FAANG person who thrived at that company was the single worst leader I've ever reported to. He is a LinkedIn influencer with his own newsletter where he talks about, among other things, his expertise in "Organizational Design". Yet the organization he designed was completely dysfunctional because he ignored how the business worked and instead hired arbitrary numbers of people according to some book he read. Half of the people at that company were 90% idle, while the other half were working 80 hour weeks because the "organizational design" person had strictly assigned responsibilities to arbitrary teams in a way that didn't account for how the business actually worked.
The next line from this post is exactly how he responded to every problem:
> Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solution is to divide that area into 5 sub areas and hire someone for each of them to figure it out, etc. that’s their solution.
He was never accountable for anything because he always had someone under him to blame.
This story is remarkable in one sense: the founder removes all of his own agency from the story. The vast majority of initial financing rounds leave the founders in control of companies these days…
Finally, a VC backed company is always likely to die. If you want to run a nice, small SaaS, don’t take VC. Whether financing comes from a bank loan, an angel, private equity or VC, one job of entrepreneurs is to align incentives with capital sources.
IMO, it is foolish to hinge the decision of taking VC money or not based on potential lifespan alone.
VC money could kill your startup quickly, but you could potentially make a lot of stable money in that short period of time, and end up better off than collecting smaller profit from your small SaaS that lives for a longer period of time.
And yea most of the time you are reinvesting profits but you should hopefully be paying yourself too along the way. Not to mention you are also paying a lot of other people as well and creating value for them.
Ultimately VC money isn’t destroyed, it’s just reabsorbed into a wider economy.
They raised at an inflated valuation and seemingly received a favorable multiple (100-10x “7-figure” revenue). The fact that they rode out the company to 0 means they had board control and were never fired. So they are ultimately responsible for every decision they made. Including over-hiring and not firing their clueless VPs.
I say this as a founder of a yc-backed company that was acquired. I know the pressures of short-sided VCs. I also know that the job of a founder is to pick which advice you follow.
The results are predictable. Note how there is no acceptance of personal responsibility.
I also note that there isn't a shred of evidence for this whole story, and $100M to $0 does not seem like a believable trajectory (nor does $0 to $100M, but the other is much less believable).
A key requirement of any company is managing your equity holders.
A year later, we had our first round of vc fund. I had a slight bump in salary, but owned stocks so all is good. My role was, make-things-work-at-all-cost. I'd be on calls with customers and their engineers to make things work. I'd generate specialized reports by merging data locally, I'd get a calls on my personal phone from customers. We did the things that don't scale.
Year 2, we are 30 employees getting ready for another round of funding, the ceo and cto spent all their time in vc meetings. I worked in all my waking hours, it was unsustainable. I told them I needed a break, the way they responded showed me that I was just another replaceable employee.
I packed my stuff and left, they tried to screw with my stocks, but i fought back and got it all. They got their second funding. They never replaced me. Instead of hiring 2 or 3 people to do my job in a scalable manner, they stopped offering the service all together. Instead they went with buzzwords in AI.
Fast forward 3 years. The company was acquired, the stocks are worth 0 dollars, and most employees got fired. Though the linkedin post sounds like a success story.
2) > I hope this part is clear because it’s the crux of the misalignment between founders and VCs.
This is the crux of the misalignment between small business owners and VCs. The large majority of the startup founders I've met all have dreams of building a rocket ship, not of building a happy small business. If you're in the latter camp, as I have been several times, you usually know better than to take VC money.
I'd imagine by doing actually useful job there
This is someone in their teenage to twenties, who makes 10 reddit accounts a month, farms karma on them, then sells them to spammers in a couple months for a couple hundred dollars each.
If you're a marketer who wants to create networks of shill accounts (happens more than you think) then you need enough accounts that meet these requirements.
Beyond gaining some sort of reputation for not doing what your investors want, is there anything else?
And if you put it to work to any degree, you start growing and accruing costs.
You are then in a race against time for the next raise and you are off to the races.
The actual deals are very complex and the details are hard to understand but it isn't as simple as "here is $10m go make me rich".
Then VCs won't invest in you, put a bunch of cash into a competitor, bleed you dry and either let you die or force you to reincorporate in a way they can have ownership.
VCs are a cancer. They want to spread and grow, at any cost.
You think you need to bring the tenured exec in with all of the industry contacts, but they are often a terrible cultural fit or experienced in the last iteration of your industry. They also want to hire under them rather than work the tools themselves and do this bait and switch after you’ve hired them.
You are then stuck with high salaries for ineffective people or an expensive and disruptive exit.
VCs also seem to push these people onto you as they think that is what constitutes a real company and/or they want a nice gig for their friends.
Some times your money printer won't scale, but other people will try to convince you that it's full of golden eggs?
If you're cash-positive you should see VC as supplicants begging for scraps?
It makes sense. If he got there quick, his product was working, and it had a chance at gold. Ultimately, lots of ways for startup to fail and failing-to-scale is one of them.
Well, he knows there's PMF at a small market now. He can try again without the large raise if he wants to run a lifestyle business.
But that makes this whole thing pretty circular—they only would have $100MM valuation because they sold a story of growth to investors. Assuming that the round at $100M valuation was during the boom times of 2019-2021, that could have been with as little as $3-5M annual revenue (20-25x multiplier).
Assuming slow or no growth, a company with $3M in revenue would be worth <$15M.
FANNG hires?
That’s not an exhaustive list of course.
The problem is those VC firms are much harder to get started with.
After all the whole schtick of the VCs complained about in OP is to fund tons companies and make so much money off the unicorns that it doesn't matter how many fail.
Honestly though there is one upside to VC money: it also caps your losses. Most forms of debt for a small company rely on you being a creditor meaning you can be in the hole if your company fails.
Overall getting money is hard and nuanced which makes sense given there is nearly infinite demand for it.
I've heard these "grow until you burst" stories some times, but no one ever told a good way of getting free from the VC without retaliation
Who could have predicted this?
because you paid yourself $300k for 5 years despite having such low performance
The reddit poster goes on to comment:
>15 minutes phone call to decide to file for bankruptcy and for them to take their money back (and then some) and shut down my company
What? In no world would that happen. Even a mostly failed company has quite a bit more value than $0.
No mention of the name of the company or even the vertical. 100% BS.
In the same way $100M could just have been $99M or even $80M, and then $0 they started with could just as well have been $20K in savings he invested.
Does it matter if the company in the post didn't even exist, as long as the story is similar to what actually happened to many others?
It's probably more reasonable to say "Not all the blame is on the VC". I've seen VCs, rich guys in their fifties with a lot of swagger, put unreasonable pressure on young padawan entrepreneurs to take more capital to grow faster than necessary. Then they over extended and it started failing apart. The entrepreneurs are ultimately responsible for taking the cash, but the power dynamic is such that the VCs surely deserve some blame for pressuring inexperienced entrepreneurs into biting off more than they could swallow.
You don't think that should have any blame at all?
CS degree.
"I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams."
"Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?"
*crickets*
We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.
Boy was I wrong. My first question was "Name the most common data structures you use day to day". He stayed silent for a bit and then said "What, do you want me to just list them?" I said yes. After some more silence he said he couldn't recall any. The fact that he said "list" was particularly ironic.
I kind of gave up on expecting used-to-be software developers to have retained a single bit of knowledge from their time as a dev after they've moved on to "leadership" or "management". I believe it's important for technical leadership to understand technical problems and their solutions in broad strokes, but it seems I'm mostly in the minority in the real world. That interview (and trying to hire for that role) really showed me how little engineering leaders remember about software.
Because it is terminated with A ZERO."
Either that or they're completely incompetent. Likewise it takes a special kind of stupid to think they could wing it.
This is a low IQ question.
A brief case study: Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The argument has been made (and I agree) that much of their early failures stem from not understanding/implementing Unified Command. They didn't have a Joint Task Force Commander who was responsible for the entire Area of Operations. They didn't have an Air Component Commander subordinate to the JTF to ensure all air operations achieved synergy with, and were in support of, the ground scheme of maneuver.
Most field-grade officers who have planned and/or executed a major multi-service or multi-national training exercise are familiar with Command Relationship org charts and understand WHY they are important (if that stuff isn't clear, responsibilities get fuzzy when edge cases arise, and then in the resulting confusion/friction....people die). It's also just as important to understand how much of that "big DoD" cruft you can peel away when you are doing small, localized training with a developing nation with....austere practices, shall we say.
So I could see adding "Organizational Design" to my LinkedIn....unknowingly putting myself in the same bucket as "hot-air no-nothing ex-FAANG managers". And then no one cares what digital signal processing stuff I could do for them as an IC... :(
Is the claim that innovation only happens in the USA? That the only good companies are US companies? What are the specific benefits, other than merely indulging the startup fantasies of a relatively small number of founders, that come from this "high risk, high reward" environment?
The advantage is not in American recklessness, it’s in American shamelessness. The only risk made is in the money, someone’s “honor” doesn’t play into it, for the most part.
> Nowhere else on the planet are you able to do that with such magnitude, not in Japan, not in Europe, not in China
Europe had that too, rich nobles sponsored scientists and artists.
We are back in aristocratic society
In Australia, we have similar issues.
We also face geographic and population restrictions.
I’m often advising clients to stop listening to advice from Unicorn CMOs from SV. America had 100s of millions of people.
Australia had ~25m.
You arnt going to sell a million widgets by engaging an Instagram influencer. You arnt the Kardashians.
Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to and reading about SV culture and the companies.
It’s a fascinating world, to me anyway :-)
I could see this happening with AI.
You are right: low 7 figures = $3-$5M annual revenue
Depends upon the composition of the quorum. If the quorum is mostly "eh it works, just ship it", jugaad, chabuduo, corner cutting engineers, then I've witnessed adverse results.
Conscientious engineering that delicately balances trade-offs is difficult to teach, and poorly discerned by most casual observers (even other conscientious engineers casually observing) in the short term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
I love seeing other culture's words for the universal engineering concepts of "hack", "kludge" and "bodge"
The VC world is a little slice of the tech world. Hacker News is a wee little slice of the tech community.
That’s my point. People think their context is everyone’s context. You expect the world to be a certain way. Is it?
Especially when they're up against the people that own the company!
Reminds me of a project life cycle cartoon I first saw in a software book early in my career.
Just now searched for "systems analysis tyre cartoon" and selected this page, which seems the best, on a brief look, since it has both some history and multiple versions of the cartoon:
https://www.businessballs.com/amusement-stress-relief/tree-s...
I especially like “how the customer was billed”.
Good one. A Bridge Too Far ... (1)
I shall sell them a naayysse lil ship in Arizona.
On paper it looks like money is being spent on product development. In practice, it's a network of friends using buzzwords to direct VC money into their pockets.
Investors don't mind it too much. Fund managers are not investing their own money either (and are part of the game) and angels hope that a chance of owning 1% of the next Uber justifies all the financial shenanigans.
It is not exactly useful knowledge to keep top of mind. It is not like you need to look up how to use daily data structures. I had an easier time remembering the names of data structures I almost never use, or even have never used, as retaining their names actually has some usefulness.
In an interview situation, I expect I would also give up with stating I could not recall any to save the awkwardness of sitting there silent for half an hour racking my brain.
Certainly not by dictating their names to my coworker. Why would I need to know their names? I suppose some languages require you to know their names in order to use built-in implementations, but lots of languages use other syntax – often void of natural language (e.g. [], {}, etc.) – to do the same.
I eventually got there, but it took awhile to remember. That's great if you have prioritized trivia to occupy your mind's space, but I have found no reason to.
Maybe id the question was name 3 data structures, any 3 it might sit well.
But even so. The question did devolve into list of things somebody should know as a ex developer.
When money was cheap, delivery didn’t matter for a while.
But I'm assuming OP is hiring for a lower-level language role where that knowledge is necessary. I've interviewed people with similar levels of incompetence. Again for that Django role, people who did not know the difference between GET and POST. I'm amazed they made it past the first phone screen with our hiring manager. And I'm curious how bad the people who did not pass the phone screen were.
Could it be inferred? It feels kind of self explanatory...
But I could be wrong
How do you run candidate interviews?
Also, after reading your comment, I went back and looked at all the panels.
I now see a Zen-like quality of nothingness in 5, 7 and 10.
Edit: Sorry, I was wrong. Must have mixed them up.
Why would you need to _communicate about programming_? Because it's a core part of your job...
> That's great if you have prioritized trivia
Every interview question can be characterized as trivia if you squint hard enough.
Honestly, I am not sure I have personally ever had to communicate low level details like that with anyone else. The people I have talked pogromming with in my life have all be capable technologists, which allow us to discuss in high level detail. If a list is the right data structure for whatever high level problem we are trying to solve, it is assumed we know that and understand how to use it.
> Every interview question can be characterized as trivia if you squint hard enough.
Well, I suppose. And there isn't anything wrong with trivia per se. But at the same time it should not be surprising when someone doesn't have an answer. A lot of this stuff just isn't worth having in immediate memory – unless you enjoy trivia, in which case, cool!
This feels like either hyperbole or extremely rare/almost impossible, but regardless for myself and those I hire, I believe it to be a core competency.
I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.
What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.
Possible good indicators: "I haven't written C code in a decades, but one is a byte, one is a structure" "I'd be in over my head with Unicode but.." "What are you looking to solve?"
Bad indicators: Hostility. Authoritative wrong answers.
(For a director of Product role once, I was asked the difference between REST and SOAP -- not because he cared that I knew the answer, but because he wanted to see how I could work with an engineer who was focusing on the wrong problem)
Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.
did it work for that purpose?
That’s pretty textbook overthinking for an interview. The point is that it varies from codebase to codebase. Tell me about what you normally use and I’ll ask questions.
> Maybe id the question was name 3 data structures, any 3 it might sit well.
Trying to get every human to agree on the wording for an extremely easy and general question isn’t a worthwhile use of time though.
> But even so. The question did devolve into list of things somebody should know as a ex developer.
Interesting use of “devolve”. An an interviewer for a technical role, am I not allowed to have a set of required skills? And is a basic understanding of common data structures not allowed to be in that set?
It devolved, because it went from what looked like a structured question with a finite expcted result, "Name the most common data structures" , to something more loose, a list of structures, any structures.
Further more, we agree, the candidate was trash, and I don't think the wording would have helped. But I do think a more precise question, or maybe a less loaded, or bias inducing question of "name some data structures". Namely, because "common" is subjective as I pointed out. If you are writing lisp all day, well, list are your most common. If you happen to be in assembly then registers are. So to be a better interviewer you don't want to taint the question with your notions.
That's the thing though. _Any data structure is fine_. Say anything!
It may not be unreasonable, but the question didn't ask that. Granted, it is unlikely the interviewer was skilled in interviewing and the ill-conceived question was born out of their own lack of ability in the the job they were thrown into doing. The reality is that very little effort goes into researching the science of hiring in the first place, and it is even less likely to find people who are both experts in technical matters and experts in what little we do know about interviewing. For how critical businesses claim the hiring process is, it is amazing how they will so often happily throw the first bumbling idiot they can find willing to accept the interviewer role into it like it doesn't matter.
But for every candidate that could answer, I think so.
It came to mind first because I don’t know the intimate details and would need to look them up should I ever need that structure. That leaves reason to keep the name in active memory, unlike the structures you use daily, which never have reason to communicate outside of artificial situations.
You can tell pretty quickly how involved they were and if they were thinking through solutions vs just doing as told.
Some of my favorite other questions are:
1 - You're diving into one of our repos for the first time and you need to add X feature. Let's assume everything is perfect, what would you want to see in the repo and what are your first steps in learning the code?
2 - Tell me about your favorite bug? It doesn't have to be one you caused. And it doesn't have to be a super technical obscure bug. Just your favorite bug.
3 - What are some of your personal philosophies when it comes to programming. In other words: What are some of your opinionated takes. I understand, when working here you'll follow company policy. But what if you were the person who wrote the company policies.
All are great jumping off points for further discussion and open up a lot of followup questions. I find they're pretty hard to fake after the conversation goes on for more than a minute or so.
Yes, but which has more utility for you.
Do you tell people what you are indexing for? Its not a fair assessment if you don't tell which has more utility for you, or don't tell the recruiter how to help people prepare and just gaslight people with "there's no right/wrong answer, I just want to see how you think" if you actually want someone that does what they were told or someone that synthesized solutions. Many people have experience in both environments and have an answer for both environments.
World hegemony: mostly a function of the post-WWII situation, combined with our willingness to spend absolutely insane amounts on our military and use it to impose or at minimum encourage US interests globally.
Very high standard of living: the US has one of the highest GINI coefficients world wide, so only a median comparison (which is quite hard to develop) really conveys the differences accurately. Large swaths of the USA (notably Appalachia and also the desert southwest) have a substantially lower median standard of living than most of Europe.
Anyway, even if your claims about the USA were true, that by itself doesn't connect them to the VC risk/reward culture under discussion.
Such as? Name three examples, please. "smartphones and cars" doesn't cut it, those are pretty common even for low income citizens here in Germany at least, and we don't really need air conditioners on account of being located in higher latitudes – everyone has heating, though.
You're 100% wrong about not needing air conditioning in Germany. Many of the last 45 days here have been above 24C. You're just used to being sweaty and uncomfortable.
A doctor who worked at Charite in Berlin told me last month that the whole summer he worked there he struggled to not drip sweat directly into patients as he leaned over them to work.
And yet the quality of life doesn’t even begin to compare.
We get Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Stripe, etc...
It’s the test and staging servers for global capitalism
SpaceX creates aspiration for the poor
Google allows the poor to advertise their product to anyone in the world cheaply
Facebook allows the poor to market their product to anyone in the world cheaply
AirBnB allows the poor to live in an expensive city, cheaply
Stripe allows the poor to sell their product to anyone in the world cheaply
Why can't this be the claim and be the end of it?
"I have a startup idea"
"Do you live in the USA?"
"No"
"Well it's going to stay as a idea"
" :( "
Why's that? Aren't these basic knowledge items almost always able to be left unspoken? "Here is what we are trying to accomplish, and you must use a map in your implementation" never seems pertinent. There is faith in the people I work with that they will understand how to best implement something.
Furthermore, if there were some reason to bring up, say, a list then I could fumble around with some other ideas to get the group there. "I'm blanking on the term, but you know, the thing you can build with square brackets.", "Oh, you mean a list?", "Yeah, that!" But that doesn't satisfy the question posed here which specifically asked for the structure by name. In normal situations you don't need that kind of thing at your beck and call like you do when you are playing with a trivia master.
> I believe it to be a core competency.
And, to be fair, if I were knowingly about to enter a developer interview I'd probably brush up on the language ahead of time knowing that it is likely that an interview very well might want to talk about the trivial basic building blocks to weed out those who have never programmed before. But I personally haven't interviewed for a job in 20-some-odd years, so again, not something in the forefront of my mind before this discussion happened.
However, of note, the interview in question was for a people-based job, not a technical role. Who is going to think to study the technical language ahead of time in that situation? It wasn't pertinent to the job. The interviewer just went there because it was noticed the person once was a developer in a past life.
Communicating about work is a core part of work.
> Aren't these basic knowledge items almost always able to be left unspoken
Nope.
> "I'm blanking on the term, but you know, the thing you can build with square brackets."
Data structures are unrelated to brackets, so I assume this is hyperbole.
> In normal situations you don't need that kind of thing at your beck and call like you do when you are playing with a trivia master.
Are your friends names also trivia? The word "car", "tree", "sun"?
Hyperbole.
> But I personally haven't interviewed for a job in 20-some-odd years, so again, not something in the forefront of my mind before this discussion happened.
Respectfully, my assumption is that you also don't work in technology, or always work alone.
> the interview in question was for a people-based job, not a technical role
Technical leadership requires some amount of software knowledge as a core competency.
> Who is going to think to study the technical language ahead of time in that situation?
Someone claiming to have 10+ years of developer experience should know the word "list". Full stop.
> It wasn't pertinent to the job
It was pertinent to the job.
> The interviewer just went there because the person once was a developer in a past life.
Well, no not really. Because the person was expected to communicate intelligently about software, and knowing the basics of data structures is again a core competency.
Absolutely, and the work I do is solving problems to further business objectives. As such, we talk about business things. Lists, sets, and maps are not normally business-related terms. Indeed, programming is the tool we most often use to implement the solutions to the particular problems we face, but it is not the work any more than a hammer is the work.
> Respectfully, my assumption is that you also don't work in technology, or always work alone.
I do not work alone, but I use the tools alone, yes. I expect most do. I don't see much evidence that pair/mob programming has ever caught on in a significant way.
> Data structures are unrelated to brackets, so I assume this is hyperbole.
They are indeed related as some programming languages use [] syntax to denote use of the data structure mentioned. If the people involved in the conversation are familiar with those languages, they can infer what is meant through the process of communication.
> Someone claiming to have 10+ years of developer experience should know the word "list". Full stop.
You're going off the rails here. A developer of 10+ years will know the word "list". That is not in question. The topic of conversation is how they will not necessarily have it at the tip of their tongue, because why would they? Unless you are caught in the 10 years of experience doing the same thing over and over trap, leaving you forever a beginner, it is not something people normally talk about.
Again, what would seasoned developers need to talk about lists, sets, and maps for? They should know them inside and out, backwards and forwards. "Hey colleague, I need a list here, but I forgot how to do it. Can you help?" never comes up. "Good news everyone, I discovered this great new thing... It is called a list!" – not going to happen. If we were talking about esoteric data structures, that's a little more conceivable, but we are talking about the ones you use essentially every time you write some code.
As a European who also lives in a 4000 sqft brand new house in the south of the US, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone though. I’d happily take a 2000sqft house that was built at least to the standard of the second of the three little pigs, something which seems to elude construction crews south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Regardless though, the size of your house says very little about the quality of your life.
[1]: https://www.winkworth.co.uk/properties/sales/lansdown-road-b...
But North America is fricking huge, and if you are willing to move out of the city it's hard to not grant you that at least: you have a loot of room.
> AirBnB allows the poor to live in an expensive city, cheaply
Yeah you're definitely trolling, not cool... or your definition of "the poor" includes people with net worth of $10M.
Maybe the problem isn't jobs but wealth distribution.
Run them yourself, then check back.
What poor person gets aspiration because of Spacex. A basketball player is cheaper and does a better job inspiring.
The poor cannot afford to run adwords campaigns and can't even get a credit card.
Facebooks ads even more expensive.
The poor are not looking for short term rentals and cannot afford to live in the most expensive cities using airbnb. They live in rundown rent controlled places.
Paypal allows the poor to buy/sell.
In the largest cities, perhaps. Don't try that in Santa Fe. For that matter, don't try it in Philadelphia, at least not after 23:00)
> 24 hour [...]
An unusual feature of western US grocery stores (not generally replicated in the midwest or east coast as a whole, though it is spreading). Not common in smaller cities or towns. 24 pharmacies are useful, but many large cities in western Europe have a few, and many small cities and towns in the USA do not.
> Cheap gas
A function of US vs. EU tax policy, nothing more (or less)
> Road trips etc.
Entirely possible in the EU and eminently common. The difference is that for many trips, you have the choice to do it the other way too, which is not feasible in the USA for most destinations.
Not only that, but if you choose to travel in a camper, in EU you have a plethora of dirt cheap places to legally pull in overnight that have bathrooms and if you need it water & electric. Essentially absent from the US.
> Hot water in sinks.
Not present in many gas station and campsite handwashing sinks.
> Whole Foods
Present in several cities across the UK. But you cannot be serious. I mean, I shop more or less 100% at WFM, but I can shop just as well, if not better, in the UK or Germany or France.
AGAIN, I ask: what is the evidence that any of this is connected the high risk/high reward entrepeneurial/VC culture of the USA? You seem to just be listing a set of things you like about the USA and waving your hands as if to say "it's all because of the entrepeneurial culture".
Some states allow interstate rest areas to be used this way, but apart from a handful, that means dealing with the noise of tractor/trailer combos running their engines all night for heat or a/c (very unpleasant).
If we want to focus on air conditioners this much it seems to me that he issue isn't that people can't afford them it's that it's very hard to get one installed if you live in an apartment building (because they weren't designed for that and due to all kinds of rules and regulation). Many people living in detached houses can easily get one without having their children skip lunch.
> Many of the last 45 days here have been above 24C
Depends on the house thick walls are pretty good in keeping heat out in summer.
Less cheap gas is a result of taxing the negative externalities of fossil fuels. Air con is rarer because intense summer heat (while it happens) is less pervasive and extreme than in most of the US. Personal vehicles are less common because public transport is great. No “Whole Foods” because good produce is common in regular supermarkets.
“Road trips” is the most hilarious point. I can hop on a train and be in one of several countries with a different culture and language in an hour.
One time I was in a Walmart Supercenter (or whatever it is they call the huge ones) in Michigan. I had been there a few times but I couldn't find the fruit & veg section any more, they seemed to have moved it and put Halloween candy in it's place. After burning 10-15 minutes searching the whole store, I gave up and asked a staff member where they put it. "Oh we got rid of that sorry". It's literally the biggest supermarket in the city and you can't buy an apple or a banana.
There was a fancier place I used to go to in that city, Fresh-something-or-other. The kind that models themselves after Whole Foods. Everything time I went there, they only ever had green bananas. I mean, totally inedible, days away from being ripe. Every time.
Honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. To think that you can reduce the food argument to the availability of _grass fed beef_ at a gas station?
How did you come to that conclusion? I mean are you talking about taste preferences or about the quality.
Because quality wise it seems that there is quite a bit more variability in the US than in some nicer European countries like France, Spain, Italy and some chains in Britain and other countries (EE OTH is not that great even when comparing to the US...) but in general you can find "high quality" food if you look for it.
For the Americans, 24C means “many days have been above 75F” which I don’t think is going to get a lot of sympathy.
Funny thing is that you’ve described Moscow here.
> You're 100% wrong about not needing air conditioning in Germany.
I realize that for an average American Germany is just a point on the map, but here in the north we had only a couple of hot days this summer. Otherwise - a truly horrifying story.
Please do tell more. I’m curious to learn.
which is quite absurd. I'm yet to find such gas station in any European country and I've been to at least half of them. Also Whole Foods seems to be quite a bit average even when compared to European supermarkets in most countries.
But I can see that approaches to this may differ.
