Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated.

Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.

Small business vs big brand is a problem of predictability. If you have many independent small businesses, NOT all of them will be good. It will be a mixed bag what you get in your area. OP has felt so fortunate with his local highly-skilled asian-owned small business that he felt compelled to write about it on the internet. Not everyone will be this lucky.

And in a world where information travels very fast (this is really the key point) this system is unsustainable, as there are really only 2 options: either people accept the fact that some neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on the internet, because that’s apparently worth it.

But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale. Because as soon as the nice asian shop goes viral, they realise they can’t keep up with the demand at all. And so they will probably refuse lots of customers. (Note, I’m not even considering the option they might increase prices)

In this sense, the derogatory “lifestyle business” comment makes sense, since I think it’s meant to highlight how elitist it is. It doesn't scale in the sense that it creates a race for who is able to cop the best option. When I need a sofa, I want to be able to “just” get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even better.

They could but they won't. Because they realized (and probably all agreed) that it's far more profitable to sell the customer a new product, rather than fixing the old one. And since they are the big brands, and they have practically a monopoly (think about big tech companies) they make the rules. They even have the power to sue the crap to which small business tries to fix their products, like Apple did multiple times.

The repair culture is not something sustainable for a big business, that to stay in the market has to increase year after year their sales, and the only way to do so is... making consumers buy new products, even if they don't need them. How to do so? Decrease the quality of the products, make them impossible to repair. No big business would stay alive if they sold you a couch that lasts a century.

Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services.

At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to justify for lower cost items. I have had shoes resoled and otherwise repaired but haven't done it in years and probably most recently a pair of very expensive custom hiking boots that were made to be repairable. (And the repair was probably $200 or so.)

Things I might have taken in to be repaired 25 years ago like a laser printer just don't make sense to do so today.

Then there is dealing with the customer. A lot of people like to know how much a repair will cost. You can offer an accurate quote when replacing an entire module. A lot of people cannot understand bills that are $0.05 parts + $100.00 labour, so they feel ripped off. A lot of people cannot understand why a repaired product would exhibit problems when it is returned to them (e.g. there was an independent undiagnosed problem).

Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that is precisely what they hope for, and ideally you should be purchasing a sofa more frequently than you already do to further support this notion.

Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one but that's not obvious to the consumer and it's not clear how to even make this type of judgment. Which sofa really costs the most to you given the information I just provided? The high-quality $1500 one or the $800 dollar one? To a rational person having all of the above information - the more costly one is cheaper - but to an average consumer not having this information the clearly cheaply made product is the better choice. People also are prone to more short-term thinking in many societies which also doesn't help things but the takeaway in general which you posted there is very wrong: mass production and scale usually result in higher-quality products not lower quality ones.

> Looks great on the outside

Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues, partly because the corners are cut in places which are hard to spot before purchase. Price doesn't work as a discriminating factor (except to filter out a portion of the worst inventory) because of the number of brands explicitly trying to pass off junk as high-quality luxuries.

If you really can't tell which one is better, and you're as likely to get scammed buying something expensive, why not put less money on the line for something that has a chance of being good enough?

Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, in parallel to this, we have corporations whose modus operandi is at worst to lie to consumers about quality, and at best to mislead. And not just about specific products, but about quality as a general concept.

E.g., with the right training you can tell the difference between the sort of particle board flooring that will balloon up and be destroyed when a drop of water lands on it, the sort of particle board flooring that resists minor water infiltration, and various grades of "real" floors, but most people don't have that training.

Separately (and I _think_ my messaging was clear about this -- talking about the corners being cut being ones that are hard to discover and describing the companies doing that shit as scammers), yes I totally agree; corporations are absolutely not passive participants in consumers being unable to make educated decisions. Even major brands will actively defraud consumers (e.g., Garmin revoking a bunch of lifetime licenses on Navionics software and trying to whitewash public opinion by claiming it was for the customers' own good, or Atlassian blatantly ignoring the CCPA because it's a fairly toothless law), and there exists a plethora of maybe-legal-but-obviously-wrong behavior from most successful companies, including but not limited to "lies, or at best misleadings."

Say you have an IoT device. It's marketed as a device capable of doing a task (e.g., scanning car OBD codes). That task can be done offline. The device initially does that task offline. The app had a backdoor, and the owning company used that backdoor to force logins on previously happy users. Later, they restrict functionality-which-could-be-completely-offline-and-used-to-work to people who pay for a monthly subscription, or maybe they go out of business or otherwise just decide to shut down the servers (see the recent Spotify debacle).

With that backdrop:

- The ToS usually ban class actions and require arbitration.

- The fraud in question is on the order of $20-$200 -- not worth being pursued for most people.

- The ToS are somehow magically invoked when you buy the product, regardless of whether you even saw a warning message suggesting that there might exist a legal agreement which you should read.

The usual outcomes are (1) you get a default judgement and are unable to exercise it because the company goes bankrupt or does some sort of shenanigan which requires a lawyer costing more than the damage in question (a common solution is spinning off a subsidiary owning all the bad debt and responsibilities, keeping the assets elsewhere, kind of like what Johnson and Johnson tried after the talc/cancer debacle), (2) despite the company's best efforts you get a class-action judgement, and the company settles for much less harm than they inflicted, happily pocketing the difference, (3) other more complicated and/or less desirable situations.

What does an individual do to limit their liability in a world where that sort of fraud seems to be condoned, and what options do we have as a society to reduce the overall problem?

The entire concept of corporations as a shield from liability is actually really dubious in my opinion.

This is rarely the choice though. In my experience, the choices tend to be the $800 low quality sofa, the $3000 low quality but with a name brand sofa, and the $6000 low quality but with an even fancier name brand sofa.

Presumably there are some manufacturers that still produce furniture that's actually made of massive wood rather than cardboard and veneer, but it's becoming increasingly rare.

Maybe next time.

Even an $800 sofa will probably last much longer than five years. An added benefit to disposable items is that when you move and/or your tastes change, it's easier to abandon the old sofa and buy a new one than to take the old one with you. (With a little luck and perseverance you may even be able to recoup a few bucks by selling the old one.)

But the quality is incomparable.

Also, custom sofas take time to build - not much, but 2-4 weeks or so.

So there are a lot of reasons big brands are convenient. But you pay for that convenience in quality.

So, how often do you eat at McDo?

(whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories, simply and predictably)

Just because you want to "'just' get a sofa" it does not follow that you "'just' get some food" as well. Or at least not always: sometimes you may 'just' want to, and sometimes you'll want something more that 'just' calories.

And you may not care about sofas as compared to other things: you may 'just' want a sofa, but if you're really into cooking then you may want more than (say) 'just' some random knife, perhaps going for hand-forge Japanese steel.

Further, the cost of making a mistake with food (a few (dozen) dollars) versus a mistake with a sofa (hundreds/thousands) are on two different levels.

Within the US, yeah, it's very consistent. I've not seen much variation, other than the one or two specially decorated locations and the menu is very consistent.

Internationally, the branding is very consistent, but the product isn't that consistent. The fries in Paris were very different (and not very good; my feeling is they probably used the same procedure but very different potatoes), but the burgers were pretty similar. In India, they don't serve burgers, but at least when I was there, they did have the delicious old school chicken nuggets that they replaced with 'all white-meat' bleh nuggets in the US. I didn't try any of their chicken sandwiches, because why when I could have the nuggets of my youth?

I understand there's significant regional differences in all the territories they operate in.

I don't really agree with this. Unlike big corporations that stick around despite bad service, small businesses have a reputation to maintain. The only bad small businesses that can remain long enough are ones in high density, high turn-over areas (ie: high tourism, fast changing populations like NYC). For sleepier places, these businesses rely on word of mouth and repeat customers.

The reason why people buy a sofa from a generic corp rather than this kind of shop is price.

What's better: having to do a few minutes of research to find a good sofa repair shop in your city or having to buy a new sofa every 5 years?

Further: what's better for you personally, and what's better for the planet? Are they compatible?

> But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale.

Why is it important for every type of business to scale? Is "scale" a virtue we must judge every business by?

So, how is that story going to help me? Apparently, I can't buy a sofa of this quality any more, and if I want it fixed, I apparently have to go to Canada.

We bought such a sofa per advice from a friend that’s an interior designer, and it’s amazing. At 10 years it looks like it was brand new and has withstood the first 10 years of baby life including playdates and kids drawing on it, etc (we got it with a special treatment to make it not absorb such things and it actually worked). Kids jumping off the back frame, throwing all the cushions around, etc. Literally unblemished and the internal frame is rock solid.

But also the single most expensive piece of furniture I’ll ever buy. I’ll never need to buy a replacement for it though. I expect to be using it for the rest of my life and passing it onto my descendants.

We have a 20-year-old quality sofa from a major NC company that we got reupholstered by them last year, just before they went out of business.

The article mentions a canadian refurbisher, but I don't think it implies they don't exist elsewhere.

Which is understandable, and also the whole problem. Everything that used to go along with getting that sofa, like the human interaction, is thrown out in the name of efficiency, and eventually we all end up locked in our houses with nowhere to go but our jobs.

A lifestyle business isn’t elitist, nor necessarily for elitist customers. It is in most people’s interest to invest in quality, but not everyone can afford it and even among those that do, the final price tag has an undue weight in the equation. (Not to mention that big brands are removing quality as an option even in the higher price ranges)

I think the article made a great point why big brands exist -- to deliver on the promise of unbridled growth, often leading to enshittification.

> But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.

The experience suggests that they usually offload that to a third-party vendor to cut costs and we all know that does not track as good as small, family owned, locally sourced, your trustworthy shop.

> But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale.

True. Probably does not have to. A sufficiently wide distribution of such businesses is just as good.

I would never pay 5 figures for a sofa. Our sofa was around 1000$, this talk about 3000$ for fixing cushions feels a bit off to me. Yes, yes I am part of the problem: I would rather buy a new sofa than fix a sofa for more money than a new one which is likely to hold up for the rest of my life would cost.

Other cultures don't use sofas, and I'm curious if they were originally a thing for royalty (like flat green lawns and white bread and so many other "luxuries" we royal Americans went in for), and I would vote for leaving ours (IKEA, so not the worst in terms of PFAS coating and other toxins, but also not great) with the house when/if we move, and sitting on the floor again, which my spouse and I did early on, influenced by our time in Japan (and our relative lack of money).

I appreciate this article about valuing local repair shops. I did the same with a pair of boots, and will continue to pay for such service, not least because I like getting to know craftsmen.

[0] https://worldcat.org/title/parable-of-the-sower/oclc/2825552...

Old, tatami-only houses generally won't have heavy legged furniture at all, but tatami-only houses are rarely being built. It used to be come to have a single tatami room in most homes, but that is also becoming more uncommon for new houses nowadays. In modern houses, you'd usually have sofa. I don't remember if I've ever seen a multi-room Japanese house without one, but one-room apartments can be really small, and if the owner doesn't host people often (or ever) they won't have a sofa.

What is very common in Japan (especially in small apartments and one room apartments) is a low-sofa (basically a low profile sofa, often without a base or legs) and zaisu[1] - originally a fancier sitting pillow with back for tatami floors, but nowadays it's mostly low-profile sofa chair or more often just a sofa chair without legs. These things are more flexible and portable and allow you to sit closer to the floor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaisu

Yes, modern furniture is crap and there is an epidemic of junk sold at fancy prices. If you reframe your crappy sofa as purchasing a sofa kit and pay a reasonable not-West-Elm price for it then it doesn’t seem so bad after all.

In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees”

I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.

What makes a “lifestyle business” is that the owner picks the lifestyle they want first, then designs a business around that. For example someone who wants to go rock climbing all the time is not going to consider a furniture repair shop in a big city to be a “lifestyle business.” Probably few people would consider furniture repair to be a lifestyle business, unless your preferred lifestyle is to do manual labor in a crappy warehouse every day with few vacations.

Lifestyle businesses usually take one of a few shapes:

- Monetizing the lifestyle directly: for example Instagram influencers who make a business out of their personal travel, fashion, outdoor adventure, etc.

- Running a high-leverage business at a low intensity: for example a highly automated SaaS business that is kept small and easy to run, so the owner can spend most of their time doing other things. This is usually what VCs look down on, because they seek out high leverage business models and consider anything less than max intensity to be a wasted opportunity.

- Optional businesses: for example low-intensity “consulting” gigs that independently wealthy people operate to keep from being bored, or for tax advantage.

One good way is to pay attention to the details, learn how things are made (YouTube helps with this!) and not be impressed by shitty work, in general. I buy plenty of MDF-built products but I also know the difference. There are just so many people who have no idea.

Furniture repair is also not a “lifestyle business.” That phrase is not a synonym for small business. Furniture repair is hard work and low margin. Customers are intermittent so it’s hard to take time off (because you risk losing a significant project).

A lifestyle business is a business that people set up who are trying to fund their preferred lifestyle. For example, a single person SaaS that creates monthly passive income, like half the people here on HN are trying to set up.

I worked for a lifestyle business: the owner was an entrepreneur with 2 successful exits and did not need to work. But he had set up a tech consultancy so he could work on a few interesting projects a year and funnel all his favorite expenses (new tech gadgets, cars, travel, etc) through a tax-advantaged business entity.

He picked his lifestyle and then built the business around that. Most small businesses are the other way around: the owner has to adapt their lifestyle to the business, in order to stay in business.

They may be a "just getting by" furniture repair shop, or they may make easily as much as the owners want it to, and in the meantime provides work that they and their employees (if there are any other than the owners) find interesting and/or rewarding.

This exists too (even if it may indeed not be the norm).

tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality

* He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards of $5000, and he paid more than $3000 for it in 1999. He paid $1000 now to reupholster.

* Using US inflation data which is easier to access, $3000 in '99 is around $5600 today - so practically unchanged.

* What's changed? Since the emergence of cheap badly-built furniture, it now _feels_ profligate to spend $5000 on a sofa, when in 1999 it was (hypothetically) the only option.

* Instead people feel better buying a (say) $800 IKEA sofa every 5 years, which over 25 years is the $4000 nominal he has spent on his own sofa. It _feels_ much less painful to give IKEA $800 now than to give your local artisan sofa maker $5000. Who profits from that? You moreso than the local artisan.

* It's true that the middle has been hollowed out - I can't find a well-made $1500 sofa, but on the plus side the less affluent have access to cheap sofas, and the affluent but frugal whinge and buy a new sofa every few years.

I'm squarely in the frugal bracket, if not affluent...

But more importantly (for me), because they have such a huge catalog, and a propensity to optimise, they ended up with a supremely hackable furniture - everything fits together with everything else, whenever you want to build something - there are tons of parts available - and you can buy just the parts its kinda like lego.

Also a lot of Ikea stuff is made of honeycomb paper - so it's trivial to put cables and electronics inside. I've hacked multiple tables and sofas by putting charging ports / wireless chargers and other doo-dads inside, vastly decreasing my cable management issues.

And again if anything breaks, its kinda trivial to fix it yourself, as you've probably assembled it and know where each bold and nail go.

There used to be a better mix of cheap, mid and slightly upper mid. And they often pulling crap like swapping out for cheaper materials but calling it the same model name

It is definitely not the best quality, but I have moved several Ikea pieces over the years without much ill effects. Would I like to upgrade to some "adult" furniture one day? Maybe, but I fear much of it is like other designer goods - identical crap construction with a reputable label stitched on the front.

Ikea stuff with solid wood parts: if you really like it, it's probably good value.

Ikea stuff with manufactured wood parts: you'd better really like, because it probably won't last that long or that well.

> new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures

five figures >= $10,000, not $5,000

Whereas if you pay $800 for the IKEA sofa every 5 years, you know you're actually getting what you're paying for.

Plus people move apartments, move houses, move cities. Sometimes every 5 years or even more often. The sofa that fit in the old apartment is too wide for the new one. Or the style that made sense in your prewar apartment looks silly in your modernist one. Or now you have kids and you need it to be stain-resistant. Or what felt like a cool trendy leather couch when you were 25 now looks tacky and vulgar to you when you're 34.

For a lot of people, a sofa that's a fifth the price, that lasts a fifth as long, isn't a bug -- it's a feature. Quite simply, your sofa needs change.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/files/pdf/40/04/4004a9de/seating_...

If the sofa breaks, then sure it's covered.

But it explicitly doesn't cover fabric or leather coverings -- and good luck trying to convince them that the foam padding has gone all flat.

Whereas in my experience, how long a sofa lasts is determined precisely by how long the coverings and cushions last. (I've never in my life seen a sofa break.)

So the IKEA warranty is irrelevant there.

Your UPPLAND sofa may work great for 30 years in a guest room where it's sat on 5 times a year.

But good luck getting it to last 10 years in the living room where the whole family is using it every day and kids are climbing all over it. (Of course, more expensive IKEA sofas do tend to last longer than the cheapest ones -- people are usually talking about the cheap ones.)

Depending on the Sofa you can or course get one that has IKEA+ which is replaceable covers, which you can't do with most other sofas.

(Disclosure: I work at IKEA, although I only found out the 25 year cover a few weeks ago)

The point is that having a 10 year warranty doesn't mean your cheap sofa is going to last as long as an expensive one. It's not a signal at all that IKEA sofas are high quality.

One example: What if companies rented sofas instead of selling them? Perhaps a weird idea, but humour me. The incentives would shift. Companies would be more interested to give you durable sofas. Because there will be less profit if they have to replace sofas more often.

Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw. Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating your next meal, instead of becoming one.

Related, I believe this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts. But the stakes matter. When people ordering and funding the research are really worried about losing, you get amazing pace of innovation. When they're not, you get amazing pace of fraud.

> pace of fraud

Isn't it if the stakes are high more eyes are watching and thus quality control works (better)? I'm at a loss for scenarios that would raise the bar for the sofa game. A shabby sofa could signal something about the owner that might be indirectly relevant to the mating success. But on the other hand there seems to be a niche for that market where low quality fits quite well.

Did it? I can't really find numbers on that.

The cold war -> the space race.

Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent example.

Mimicry/false signaling/bluffing (look more dangerous, look inpalatable, distract attention, attract prey), camouflage (avoid being preyed), brood paratism (cokoos get parenting for free).

None of them involve deceiving partners into pretending higher level of fitness.

Thinking about this it becomes a little clearer why this is.

When you're buying a sofa the seller usually doesn't buy a sofa made by you. So there is an assymmetry. The sofa dealer not only monopolizes most information about the deal (factual quality, costs; competitors are shared information). Also, the dealer can influence what you think. Economies of scale at play both in advertising and production.

Secondly, only if those two sofas you exchanged were to be used to produce the next generation of sofas and only if those newly merged sofa designs would be the sole base of contemporary sofa design would this comparison hold.

Then it becomes clear that if both parties engage in deceiving each other the species as the hypthetical owner of all evolving sofa designs must lose.

I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real impact".

Lifestyle business has benefits B1, B2, B3, and cons C1, C2, C3.

VC/PE talks a lot about C1, C2, C3 and promotes its business that also has benefits B1 and B2.

Amidst the deceitful noise, people forget about B3 and migrate to the VC/PE backed thing.

Lifestyle business folds.

Society/people lose B3.

This is not out competing. It's just bullshit.

This must be correlated with peer group and/or geography. I am in a mountain west city surrounded by skiers, cyclists and climbers. Lifestyle business is never mentioned in contempt, rather as a logical choice to support ones hobbies and outside interests.

In all honestly, to me you are one of the few people that come to my mind when I think of someone working on a project that's tangible and with "real impact". Precursor is so out of the box and cyberpunk and outside the confines of what institutions are working on

Hope in the future you get the support and validation that you should be getting

I didn't always have a rep -- the first step is the hardest in any journey, and the criticism was just as strong (if not stronger) back then. But, I was also a hardware guy in a software world. I'm stubborn, idealistic, and a rule-breaker, so I didn't fit in to any traditional corporate roles; no boss could manage me. That made it easier to walk out the door.

The most bold critics were always VCs -- not ones that I met with because I needed investment or anything, just folks I would run into at conferences or do an odd job for as a mercenary. You'd wrap up the job, and they'd make some quip about how it's a shame I'm wasting my talent in a "lifestyle business" and how I should consider finding some honest work at one of their companies. It was like some sort of weird negging tactic. I eventually learned to shrug it off but really, thought I was the only one who heard that term applied so pejoratively.

Thankfully, I had a few lucky breaks, and I'm very happy about where I'm at. However, it helps that I found residence in a place with affordable public health care, a functional pension system, oodles of public housing, and low taxes. No way could I do what I'm doing and also be so chill about my future without a functioning social safety net. Unfortunately, "just move somewhere that suits your needs" is not scalable advice; I wish I had a more practical blueprint for others who want to do a lifestyle business, but I don't.

That may all be a reasonable tradeoff but lifestyle business does get used as a rationale for a lot of things not all of which necessarily benefit employees. (Or maybe lifestyle business just gets used for a lot of things that are only somewhat related.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310733

It's disappointing to see, because the products were genuinely good.

I think emotionally non loaded interactions are possible here.

VCs are in the business of risky business. Their objective is to fund businesses that will grow very large or collapse very fast and where there is lots of uncertainty as to which and where money increases the likelihood of the former outcome. That's the thing they do. The mechanism that they typically use is a note that converts to equity when a certain raise condition is met either by the private or public market.

Someone who goes to them and offers equity in a profitable business that has no intention to attempt to rocketship or IPO is making a mistake. What exactly do you expect them to do here? Give you money in exchange for incredibly illiquid private stock that doesn't pay out? That sounds like a dumb deal. Only a moron would give you money on terms like that.

But that doesn't mean you can't get money. Small business financing is available from banks and the government. And you can do the typical thing of starting successful businesses and selling them off and climbing the ladder. Every day small businesses are sold for values from $1k to tens of millions. They're not valued the same as venture-backed startups because they don't have the same cone of possibility as them.

If you're going to a VC to fund a Ford dealership in Golden, CO you have to be an imbecile. Not because starting Ford dealerships is dumb, but because you're going to a basketball coach and asking him to teach you tennis.

Entrepreneurial people are rare. So when you go to this coach, and he sees you're athletic, he's more likely to say "Why not basketball?" and give you a hundred reasons you should play basketball. That doesn't mean tennis is a dumb sport. Or even that you wouldn't have a better chance with tennis. It means you went to a basketball coach and he wants you to play basketball because your success is also his.

For someone with this guy's reputation, he could easily run the business himself. And it's the same for geohot. He doesn't need venture funding to sell $1 million worth of AI at home devices. It's not contempt from the VC. He's found an athlete, and he knows how to coach basketball. So he wants the athlete to play basketball.

And proceeds to use emotionally loaded words like "moron" and "imbecile". No, the contempt comes from thinking that their way of living is intellectually(/morally) superior, hence, not a lifestyle. For perception of contempt, that's from not wanting their way of living to be seen as intellectually(/morally) deficient.

The very best VCs should be able to keep the contempt hidden, perhaps with profit rationalizations, like you, or moral rationalizations, like a dang, but I understand the curiosity to see if, when we put geohot+bunnie against 2 very equanimous VCs, which team will win the social media battle ;). Especially if we give your fave team a 1-dang handicap

This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it to be 'king of the world'? Have more money than god? Have power to control others?

If that's it, lifestyle businesses sound much more human. Who wants to pretend to be god, rather than being oneself?

The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you build your business successfully?

Not all games are zero-sum, I had to tell him.

If they encourage a thousand lifestyle business bloom, one might turn into a boot-strapped "unicorn" that didn't take their money, so it's in their own interest to make lifestyle businesses seem like a terrible idea.

The more talented people are convinced the only way to start a business is with VC, the higher a value VCs can extract from talented people. If we actually had more socially acceptable options, more folks would have the leverage to walk away from the table and shove the VC's non-competes, non-disclosures, preferred shares and meddling board seats in their face.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-...

Though I think there could be more to it than that: (1) the full development of that site would have required cooperation from the news industry that isn’t easy to get and (2) I don’t think they got the word out well because despite star-studded founders and investors and my being interested in that sort of thing (to the extent of doing market research and product analysis for that kind of thing) I never heard about it until the last week…. And that’s for a business much more interesting and innovative that the comparable Threads or Bluesky.

From the outside though it seems like 1.5 years is not a lot of time to exhaust the possibilities of growth for a site like that. (As I see it Reddit took more like 3 years for subreddits to become what we know)

On the other hand there are the zombie unicorns.

I have been watching Temu: I saw the ads, I bought what could be most of my halloween costume this year and two rolls of fox stickers (not sure if that was a mistake or a dark pattern) and a dragon figurine. Almost everything was smaller than I expected and afterwards I got a huge volume of irrelevant but seemingly personalized emails. I think they’re a paper tiger: I can be impressed by their advertising spend but they don’t seem like masters of marketing and algorithms to me.

The of course there is Uber and the other ride hailing and food delivery services. Uber has spent over $25 billion on giving subsidized taxi rides and there is no end in sight. Even at American prices, $25 billion could have built a lot of subway or light rail but Uber won’t leave such a legacy. Or if it does it will be breaking the economics of both chain and independent restaurants who have reshaped their businesses around a delivery business for which the economics doesn’t really work.

The strength of VC is it can make it bets like Temu and Uber but that can be very much a finger trap.

"Lifestyle business" is what EVERYONE did back in the day before mega corporations. I come from a long line of shoemakers, tailors, and various artisans. All "lifestyle businesses". I expressed interest in following in their footsteps but my parents had sent me to college and always laughed at the idea of me taking up the family business. They had always felt it was too much of a hard life and as is typical for immigrants "wanted better for me". Ironically, artisanal work is now highly valued and I probably would be making far more money now (and have unbreakable job security) if I had somehow convinced my parents to apprentice me.

I suppose the closest thing to a lifestyle business in tech would be freelance consultants. It's more of a thing for certain people who typically have already spent a career in mega corps or VC-driven start-ups. I can't think of many people who have STARTED as freelancers-- other than some small number of academics.

Interesting, I didn't know it's the case everywhere, not only in my country. Several beds/sofas we bought in the last 5-10 years had such poor quality they cracked in multiple places already and had to be fixed or replaced. Meanwhile a bed produced in 1970 changed 3 owners and still was in perfect condition when we replaced it (for the only reason of looking "oudated", which I regret now).

Cheap shit is going to be cheap shit.

Growing up, furniture was something that was expensive, carefully shopped for, and hand delivered fully assembled. I see the availability of cheap (to make and to transport) furniture as filling a gap in the market previously not addressed, but if you’re in a position to buy a piece you’d like to keep 15 years, maybe IKEA and Wayfair aren’t the right furniture vendor for you. High quality furniture wasn’t an inflation-adjusted $300/couch back then either.

Which is why it's strange to see people surprised that their $3,800 CB2 sectional isn't built to the same standard of quality as a $13,000 Roche Bobois sectional. Especially when they could have easily gone to the showroom and lifted a section up by a corner to learn exactly what they were buying. Or gone online and searched for clones, or called up any interior decorator in the region and just asked "where do I get a good couch?"

...but if they don't then other firms selling crappy (but "good enough") products cheap will still drive quality products out of the market. To stay even slight competitive quality manufacturers will avoid investing in new processes or equipment so that they can sell what they currently make slightly cheaper.

Either way the products go to shit.

It’s not really that hard, although of course with a couch the upholstery can hide a lot of sins.

I do know that heavy furniture is probably higher quality.

But that’s about it.

Not sure if I would spot particleboard, since it’s hidden under paint or as you said veneer.

My only realistic quality criteria are: - does it look old? - is it very heavy?

$6k is still wild though, lol. I've also never really cared for leather couches, so spending that much on one is unthinkable to me, but maybe leather is just more expensive than I realized...?

Also the thing is that IKEA hollowed out the middle market, there is only cheap crap, medium crap but still crap, expensive crap that masquerades as expensive quality, and expensive quality.

The sofa that the author bought was not expensive quality, it was medium quality. Medium quality is good enough for just about anything but it probably isn't beautiful and high quality. The stuff you are seeing around from the old days in that are more sturdy than modern things are generally not the expensive stuff, because that stuff is still expensive. It's the medium stuff.

There is no longer any more medium stuff.

Thanks, IKEA.

On edit: feelings on matter may be colored by living in Denmark, which may be more affected by IKEA than other countries (proximity to Sweden, Danish habit of everyone agreeing on one way of doing things and then there is no other way)

> Today’s $1,000 sofa is not in the same league of construction as a $299 Sears sofa (about $1,100 today) from 1980. That thing was made of actual wood.

Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was convinced this is a thing.

Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged if you can contribute. My list is still small but only because I was so late to take action.

I have an idea of why this is. But I want to corroborate my empiric base before going to the greater public with this.

Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too?

One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).

I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)

Well, in those days they had a billion less examples than we have today - or at least tens of thousands of common today product categories and things not yet existing.

But they also used weaponry (Zeno on infinite division), chariots (Plato on soul), pots (Plato on art), caves (Plato on reality), dice (Heraclitus on chance), and many other things.

Plus, famous examples tend to be re-invoked (same how computer vision students re-used Lena).

Personally I think at some point such choice became baked in into the concept of physical existence because people think in pictures and physical existence in itself is such an abstract thing. The choice of furniture however is kind of hilarious.

Some evidence that I'm not joking, two more or less prominent examples...

From Roger Penrose's "The road to reality", chapter 1.3 "Is Plato's mathematical world ‘real’?":

"I am aware that there will still be many readers who find difficulty with assigning any kind of actual existence to mathematical structures. Let me make the request of such readers that they merely broaden their notion of what the term ‘existence’ can mean to them. The mathematical forms of Plato’s world clearly do not have the same kind of existence as do ordinary physical objects such as tables and chairs. They do not have spatial locations; nor do they exist in time."

"Do Chairs Exist?" by Vsauce, ~11M views: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

"How" you ask.. I think we need to trace back when philosophers started to hit on that meme. I think the "multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists" started to jump on the bandwagon from there and things co-evolved after that. I am determined to solve that humandkind-old mystery.

If you have $10M ARR and modest growth you’re probably going to get a ~4x P/E valuation.

If you have $100M ARR and modest growth you can go public and get a ~20x P/E valuation.

So you’re not only 10x more valuable, you’re 50x more valuable.

Basically you get a massive multiplier boost on top of the increased scale.

(Rough & approximate, YMMV, etc)

If it's aniline, there's little they can do. That's also the nicest leather for a sofa (IMHO) as it breathes and so doesn't get uncomfortable to sit in when the weather is warm.

How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost is. They can adjust their purchases according to their needs, which tells us which products should exist and which should not. Businesses do not trick the customers into thinking a thing has more value than it actually does. A very large part of this economy is accurate information, and a very large part of accurate information is trust. After all nobody is going to know more about the product than the people who made it, and they will always have an interest in representing their product in the most positive light. Lemon problem.

The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. They know that you won't read the license agreement when you sign up for a service, and they will use that. They know that you won't be checking what kind of joins your sofa has. They know that you won't get as much value from their items as the adverts say. All of these abuses can be done within the law, perhaps because these same businesses are involved with shaping the law.

The feedback loop is broken, and this leads to the same problem as what the Soviet Union had. Their problem wasn't that people were lazy and didn't go to work. Their problem was that they made the wrong stuff. Things that nobody wanted, often with the same quality issues as what you get these days buying an item from a market economy. Note that GDP figures will still not know this, it just sees all the crap and counts the money paid for it.

Often we pick on MBAs when it comes to this sort of critique, and there's some merit to it. If your only goal is to make money, and the economy is riddled with loopholes where you can make money without providing value, then we will have an economy that doesn't provide a lot of value, because MBAs are really good at finding these types of things.

Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name.

Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us:

> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so.

The post that you are replying to wrote:

> The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money.

Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.

At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan:

(1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money.

(2) Complete elimination of bank runs.

(3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt.

(4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation.

We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.

Not really, as the gradient points towards those companies cheapening out or folding. After all, under information asymmetry, companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those selling mid-quality goods for mid-level price honestly.

> I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company!

That's assuming any of those guides aren't paid advertisements, which I believe most are. Even Wirecutter is questionable nowadays. And that's before considering that manufacturers do stuff like giving first high-quality batch of products to reviewers, and then, couple months down the line, swapping components and process for cheaper, low-quality ones, but retaining the SKU.

100%, and to make matters worse - the consequences don’t even matter to them. They don’t care if people find out, because all they have to do is outlast that medium price/quality point business and they’ve won, and once they’ve won, it’s game over, that middle section isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Just instead of an entity called "political party" it's being directed by board of directors of said corporations. And they're very effective at lobbying further to decrease chances of market competition as well.

So the system you're describing is not actually happening to the extent we need in the wild, we're drifting away from market economies to centralized economies.

Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).

E.g. look at phone, car, TV or any other similar markets and just how homogenous they became.

Heck, my mobile phone reviewers are outright quitting because that whole billion $ market is pretty much stagnant.

This role used to be filled by reputable stores.

You aren't offering most of the things people can imagine,

You aren't offering all the latest trendy stuff, important in the moment,

You're paying people to check the quality of your limited range of dusty goods.

(Wikipedia has solved this problem by having an army of 120,000 active and mostly conscientious volunteer editors, but that's some kind of magic trick or luck that cannot be deliberately copied into other domains.)

It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there".

In isolation, it is true. You could spend a day going out on the internet to try to learn what kinds of join your sofa might have. I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem.

There are a LOT of products in the world. You will not know the unknown unknowns of every item. Even the known unknowns are often not worth your while to spend time on, because a scale manufacturer can provide an item at a price below which you will not bother to check.

The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.

Anyways, for the crowd, in another post, you say: "May I add, cheap shit will always win if most people don’t have the initial money to spend on quality. A 400€ dollar shitcouch seems better than no couch at all."

Sounds like you completely understand my point

What's is this thing you're always seeing attempting to be rebutted? I'd love to hear more specifics.

> I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem.

I worked my butt off from a college dropout waiter to get to the point that I had enough money to care about this and specifically did. I'm glad I was able to afford a shitty sofa in the interim. You are mindreading and myopic.

> The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.

3rd try: when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?

But the main idea is that modern businesses are undermining the efficient allocation of resources.

> therefore something(?) should be illegal

What did I say should be made illegal?

> You are mindreading and focused on putting down the messenger.

No I'm not. Suspecting that you've never thought about sofa joins is very reasonable, you might be the only person I've ever communicated with who has ever done this. You feel put down because I think you're not a sofa expert?

> Why not discuss this amorphous idea that is always attempted to be rebutted and never can be?

If you want to discuss amorphous ideas you will need to accept they might have some merit. Not being able to put your finger on something can be challenging, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there.

> Again, when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?

Is that a requirement? I have to have a demand? Sorry, but I'm writing a few thoughts from the comfort of my bed and expecting others to constructively contribute, like one does here.

The problem here is trust. The trust that the monetary amount I am paying is equivalent to the real value I am getting. And that our society accepts that it is a sound business model if this trust is broken.

I’d love a world where companies had to simply, and truthfully, explain how their products were built, maybe even do some standard testing and tell me how long it’s likely to last.

Motte: "people tell me to go to North Korea for my idea that it should be illegal to make couches with the wrong joins, use license agreements, or air ads that don't match my eventual experience",

Bailey: "I don't know what a join is, and I shouldn't need to"

Again, I ask: What's actually being proposed here? If nothing, is this just white collar barroom conversation, via griping?

- Ban most of the advertising as it's known today, recognizing it for the cancer on modern society that it is (see: [0]);

- Make vendors pay for costs of disposal of their products; this would curtail the profitability of shit-tier products and planned obsolescence;

- Institute a carbon tax; this will improve things across the board.

--

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

"So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want is a system where we can get quality products that are not manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system definitely ain't it.

Sure you could imagine something better. But such a system could very easily have fatal flaws you didn't imagine. In fact, North Korea started as just such a utopian ideal.

You could also argue that we used to have a system that was better than this. But if that system ultimately became this one, than reverting to the previous state would likely at some point result in the current state occurring again.

So in a sense "Do you want to live in North Korea?" is the only valid question.

You're right in that reverting to a previous system will always be a temporary solution, but I don't believe there is any perfect system able to endure until the end of times.

"Do you want to live in North Korea?" should never be used as an argument against any kind of reforms deemed "socialist" by the Right.

As a start, would it be so bad to implement a carbon tax? Tighter control of human rights on foreign imports? Stronger social nets? The list goes on...

It seems to me, the main reason is that representatives won't vote for them. Why not? Mainly because their financial and political incentives are structured in such a way that they can't. Why are these incentives like this? You can keep peeling back layers of the onion like this forever, but as some point you realize it's just due to structures of the system that will recreate themselves in any similar system. Like how wings evolved separately in different evolutionary branches but all conform to a similar structure. Any capitalist economic system will have methods for vested interests to inhibit many types of positive change.

I want to believe we can have a better economic system, not necessarily capitalistic, maybe one where resource allocation is achieved more democratically.

Capitalism, with all its flaws, was still an improvement over feudalism. I refuse to believe it can't get any better.

Of course the cost in greenhouse gasses is astronomical, which is a big part of the problem.

China had the fastest growing middle class in the world, so much so, that as a buying market they’re absorbing the entire stock of many categories of high quality or luxury goods that are preferred by the middle class.

The Chinese worker making my phone may hate their job for similar or different reasons than the investment banker, both who famously have jumped from buildings due to work stress, both famously faces of capitalism. But, that Chinese worker is now able to provide for their family including their education and onward advancement in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Since the 1980s China has been speed running the Industrial Revolution, with massive cities forming of people who were almost entirely in rural areas previously in abject poverty and doing subsistence agriculture, all of whom now work jobs that have elevated them out of that poverty.

You can say a lot of truthful negative things about capitalism but pointing to manufacturing jobs in China is completely missing the thread.

I believe there are more effective ways of lifting populations out of poverty.

I think you may be right. Unfortunately, what I have observed is that every attempt otherwise so far has failed. I think any approach which requires strong social and philosophical alignment will fail within a few generations, because the intrinsic motivation of humans includes an element of greed that seems impossible to stamp out. Systems that acknowledges and harnesses this fact of humanity show significantly more progress, even as they too have downsides.

As for other ways to get out of poverty, we could compare China with South Korea, for example. The latter implemented rather protectionist standards on exports, and as a result was able to focus its economy on improving the country. As it stands now, a lot of Chinese citizens are still dirt poor while South Koreans can almost (economically) rival with citizens of the global North.

The author is attributing intentionality to something that has no free will or even sentience.

Capitalism and the market economy are simply people who owns things and who make decisions to buy things.

People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an item (e.g., sofas), then they will not be willing to allocate a large number of dollars towards it, so companies that charge a high dollar amount will not be able to collect them. If you are 'forcing' such companies to exist, then they have to be able to collect monies to not go bankrupt, which basically means you are forcing these high(er) prices onto the public. If the individuals who make up the public are not interested in these high(er)-cost items why should they be forced to pay the money to buy them instead of allocating their dollars to something they do value?

(Of course the prices need to reflect all the costs associated with making them, which is where things like (e.g.) carbon pricing comes in for the environment.)

In the same sense the human brain has no intentionality or sentience - it's simply neurons wired together, trading chemicals and jolting each other for shits and giggles.

Sometimes a high-level process works in a way not obvious from looking at individual parts, or even dependent on them. See also: corporations are effectively alien minds, AIs executing on top of a runtime made of humans.

> People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an item (...)

That breaks down in practice, because people have finite time and energy to evaluate and make choices, while sellers have a lot of leeway in plain lying to their customers. As a result, people mostly chose out of what's available, and quietly endure it being shit.

I started my company in 1999 with my wife and I around the kitchen table. My vision: a consulting company that never told a lie to a client. With that philosophy and 25 years of work we have built the company into two people around the same kitchen table.

I will say that the China imports have drastically improved in quality while the alternatives have consistently deteriorated or disappeared.

To the extent this raises a problem about capitalism, it's that increasingly price discovery doesn't work anymore. Competition has been the driver of efficiencies and progress for centuries, but it doesn't really work if every purchase you also have to go "but what about the carbon?" "what about the workers' conditions?" "what about the animal welfare?" "what about the landfills?". In other words, there are so many externalities conscientious consumers have to search the history of the company and rely on branding and marketing to make a decision. Many, like Mr Bray here, just throw their hands up and say the whole system is flawed.

Cheap things should be the goal. If we had a carbon tax, appropriate labor laws combined with tariffs or trade agreements, costs for landfill space or whatever, then you just need to buy the cheapest thing and that will be the most efficient!

I know I personally tried to live this philosophy 10 years ago when I purchased a $400 pair of handcrafted boots (trying to follow Vimes's philosophy), and I regret it. They've not held up well, though at least I was able to re-sole them at a cobbler here in town.

Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of taste: people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury brands, fast food vs cooking, etc.

Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former.

Capitalism merely holds up a mirror to our preferences. As it turns out, we really don't like it.

> Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former.

No they don't. There's a bunch of information asymmetries and missing choices that make the equilibrium warped and bizarre, rather than revealing anything so simple about society. Sure it's at some local optimum but there can be still be wildly better global optima that the system has trouble reaching.

This is what I meant by mental effort. With the advent of the Internet, most of these asymmetries are gated by at most a couple of hours of online research.

(Yes, I'm annoyed when I want to read an interestingly headlined article that first requires a subscription. Yes, I also use archive.is to get around some outlets' paywalls. That said, I do try to pay for the online newspapers and magazines that I read the most, and I think it's worth nudging others in that direction as well.)

The best term I can come up with to describe the phenomenon you dislike is _modern consumerism_ (although not perfectly accurate). Many people now want more new stuff cheaper. That's what drives companies to produce things more cheaply.

However, one can blame capitalism, but the soviets also used to cheap out on material quality, shops, distribution, wages and maximize bribery.

When I discovered a polity full of SMEs and resilient lifestyle businesses, I immigrated here.

Some vague thoughts from a few decades of trying to figure out specifically why it seems to work so much better than the Old Country:

Resilient family farms: that is indeed hefty regulation, as well as willingness to forgo the last percentage point or two of economic efficiency.

Resilient lifestyle businesses: the apprenticeship system plays some role here, and I bet the same consideration to efficiency applies?

I guess part of it depends upon who's making the investment decisions:

- Owners are often happy to shave off a few percentage points in favour of intangible benefits.

- Workers (here, the term includes outside management) are less happy, as they're agents, and a few points for the owner may be 20-50% of the agents' vig.

- Finance types run at full efficiency or nothing, as their entire business is built around picking up nickels in front of the steamroller, you can't expect them to leave nickels around that are only in the path of tricycles.

Final thought: if you want a lot of new businesses, fast, you're going to get "late capitalism" and the goods & services equivalent of row crops.

If you've had your economy for some time and are just fiddling at the edges for growth, you can have a bunch of lifestyle businesses, the goods & services equivalent of orchards.

(I once lived in a neighbourhood in the Old Country that still had corner stores, because it was older than the automobile, and although "late capitalism" prevents corner stores from arising in new neighbourhoods it's more or less neutral towards existing ones)

EDIT: for exact identities, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861369 and my comment history more generally, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry#Personal_life_a...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM (2017)

The process became much easier for our neighbours while I've been here, which, being zero-sum for available slots, is to say it became more formidable for the Old Country. As of today, I wouldn't be surprised if it's easier to get in from Tunisia than from Texas.

It could be tougher; no one ever asked me if I could make a roux :-)

EDIT: I couldn't rapidly find GDP splits by firm size, but an easy comparison is that ~3/4 of all employees work for SMEs here, as opposed to under 1/2 for the Old Country. (Germany's figures are similar, and they claim over half their GDP comes from SMEs.)

Traditional VC investment by its definition is trying to hedge it's returns by investing in the time of startup founders, and often only large bets make the return worth while.

Increasingly, I agree with the idea to call a business "self-funded", because that's what it actually is, instead of bootstrapped or lifestyle.

I would say it might not be a stretch that what every founder is doing is to make an improvement in the lifestyle of their team and clients. VC investment is a good vehicle when entered into mindfully, and also drastically changes your course.