dead exits

being a founder is reaching status lows i have never before seen my entire time in tech

i really don't envy the position man. the only way it works is if u have a very clear acquisition target from the start. otherwise even at reasonably large series B places with tens of millions in revenue, u *know* u will never IPO and just can't admit it

at least the employees at those places can leave, hop around to places with better cash offers or liquid equity. as a founder you're just stuck going down with the ship with increasingly elaborate justifications

and in a few model iterations when agent swarms start to actually work and well capitalized entities can translate token spend to whole product lines it's gonna suck real bad to be budgeting around 2-10 mil total in the bank. runaway that goes far on aws bouta look real short

the whole ecosystem , the vcs included, are all still coping massively about this. trying to convince themselves there are multiples left to be had. nah dawg what's left to be had is *cash*.

if you can build a business where people actually pay you that's fucking great. there's lots of market gaps and inefficiencies and things to be done. but you better not be burning other people's money for the expectation of big payoffs in the future

bootstrapped lifestyle businesses where u make $500k a month for the next 8 months until a lab eats ur lunch? hell yeah there are bags to be had, go get em. but the music will stop and u gotta be planning for it

oh you're in yc? how does it feel being mandated to use gstack to work on some bullshit openai will invalidate as an unannounced flag flip launch within the year while you repeatedly fail to convince any "founding engineers" your equity is worth anything?

oh you're the founder of a series A b2b saas? how does it feel knowing your only shot at ever cashing out that equity is getting acquired by a lab, and your product isn't lab shaped?

anyway best of luck to all my founder friends love u all and hope it works out for ya lmao it's an ecosystem wide reckoning and none of us are actually safe