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Founders: Do Not Waste Money on TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley (calacanis.com)
70 points by jackgavigan on March 25, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments


I love the we select on merit part.

Isn't success the only measure of merit for a company?

If they have not succeeded yet they have none. It they are ready to share their income with someone else, they lose benefits hence it is admitting they partially failed.

If they cannot find investment, it means the bank already refuses them an interesting credit, or banks are not doing their jobs? Oh yes they are, they invest in companies investing, that invest as a proxy. With every level of indirection there is loss.

QE are puting a lot of money on the market, companies are sprouting like mushrooms, and then like NSA chocking on too much data, investors are losing efficiency in searching a needle in a haystack. Hence more money is lost in the process.

Not enough competition result in a bad state of the market. Too much result in an unsustainable market, especially when it is biased. Investor's money can make a company hold a market while losing money for enough time to kill the competition while having no merit other than the ability to have investments. Even the market of VC is showing signs of inefficiency.

Well, welcome to our world where "Free" market is failing even the top of the economical pyramid.

When our believes result in constant failures, we should stop believing in old fantasies. Free market and "laissez faire" do not self regulate itself in a virtuous way anymore. I suggest we try to understand how we failed and how to come back to the conditions in which it was working.


It depends. Pied piper did fairly well.


It's a compelling argument he makes. Why would you spend $4k for an event to raise money instead of pitching normally and investing in your fledgling business?


I went to the Disrupt thing as a volunteer. It's not bad value if you pay nothing and you still get to chat to people.


Well, everything for which you pay nothing is "not bad value."


Only if you don't value your time.


It still costs time...


I felt it was time reasonably well spent.


"Don't fall for their ripoff. Fall for my ripoff!"


You mean my ripoff where I give 250 startups tables for free and 15,000 founders free tickets to the event? :-p


Founders should avoid many of such events. It is waste time and money. I agree that founders should spend every extra dollar for marketing and customer acquisition.


it has been said before but it bears repeating: founders would do well to have a few hundred thousand dollars of their own money. If you don't have this money, you should be making money from day one doing something else. airbnb sold cereal.

Let me repeat this: in order to get cold, hard, cash, to create airbnb, airbnb founders sold cereal. A fast-moving consumer good.

Get money.


The cereal thing was a bit out of desperation having "maxed out a binder full of credit cards and racked up tens of thousands of dollars in charges." Probably not the ideal way to go. Though testament to the guys resourcefulness.

I'm not sure having several $100k to start, selling other stuff or pitching at disrupt are very good routes to startup success. The thing that seemed to work for Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft was building cool stuff first on almost zero budget.


Down-voted because people find it romantic living on cereal and a friends couch, all while having employees completely satisfied being paid in equity and high fives.


Tech who?


Internet engineers: target TechCrunch and set BGP routes to stun, i mean, to the nearest black hole.




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