"Startup"

You keep using that word...

Once upon a time, there were startup ventures, attempting the impossible (or at least the highly unlikely) with limited resources.  As Jordin Kare put it:

They don't have fancy buildings. That money goes for tools

Now we see things like this:

$2 billion startup GitHub

That's a startup???

Yeesh.

Then I ponder.  I see things like this (via), and I note that today's Sand Hill Road bandits aren't the Gnomes of yore, carefully investing their own money, but instead are monocultural youngsters playing with institutional money (i.e., Grampaw's pension fund).  And the companies they fund do indeed have fancy buildings, and expensive marketing campaigns... but, somehow, they seldom seem to have money left over for things like tools.

This leads me to suspect that "venture capital", nowadays, is a conduit for funneling other people's money into the pockets of real-estate developers, marketing companies, and other cronies.  And, of course, Creating Jobs (not necessarily for employees who will actually help develop a product, you understand; just Jobs for their own sake).

And, for years now, I've looked at the Big Shiny Buildings inhabited by software companies of rather modest output (and, often, perennially negative cash flow), and wondered just how many people inhabited those buildings, and what exactly they did*.  'Tis another mystery of the high-tech world.

 

* But not whether any of them had read The Mythical Man-Month.  The answer to that would be: no.