Comment by 🚀 stack

You are forgetting that when there are no corporate protections from the government, large business cannot exist. There is a natural upper bound on the size of a business, and a monstrosity like Google would have collapsed of its own weight long ago.

If you've ever worked for a large or even a medium-sized company you know what I am talking about. It is absolutely impossible that such things exist with 6 layers of managers in meetings and layers of approval for everything.

A small, more agile company would immediately run rings around them and take away their business long before anything like 'network effect' would take place.

I can't imagine more than a dozen people cooperating efficiently.

A large number of small, interoperable youtubes would achieve network effect just as easily as it reached a reasonable size. Participants would compete on quality of presentation and content, as well as for advertisers. Need for ownership of a single 'network-effect' corporation is corporate propaganda, of course.

That is assuming that there is any value to something like youtube or facebook. That is also questionable, as these are brainwashing machines developed by corporations to capture your attention with low-cost, low-quality bullshit while they show you ads.

Sep 14 · 3 months ago

7 Later Comments ↓

In my experience growing a start up to a monster, it all falls apart around 60 people. Then you don't know everyone's name and vaguely what they're working on. I went from doing my job to filling out forms for permission to do my job.

I think those of us over a certain age recall the early internet when you had a lot of small companies on the internet. Some overly inflated companies towered over others (eg Netscape and Yahoo) but they had a lot of competition too (Mosaic, links, Spyglass and a thousand search engines like Webcrawler Hotbot Lycos and later Altavista).

Early ISPs had a lot of competition as well. Numerous local companies along with the big providers of network services (AOL, Prodigy who eventually added internet connectivity outside their walled gardens.)

But here is the thing. All of this was enabled by the natural monopoly of telephone service. If we had 1,000,000 telephone co-ops operating nationwide without interconnection it all falls apart. Early electricity service was like this, fragmented with every provider a power island operating at different frequencies and voltages.

@darkghost, my startup experience is similar. The one that 'made it', was extremely productive at 3 (although I was burning both ends), became a zoo at around 30, and the big concern was going public while doing decent demos at endless meetings with investors. Then the company was no longer productive (by my definition) and dealt with standards, sales to 'anchor customers', maintenance, compliance and staffing (which went into hundreds in several countries). I was out by then, thank god.

And soon it collapsed, shrunk to around 20 on payroll, and got picked up by Google for chump change, mainly for the patents and a couple of remaining smart people.

The ones that did not make it stayed in low single digits staffwise, created amazing products, but had no chance in retrospect. I was naive, unprepared, and cared too much about things that are not important in Capitalism.

I would assert from experience, that having a product or customers in a Capitalist system is just a ticket to the game -- one that allows you to literally print money (IPO, secondary offerings, spinoffs, borrowing billions at low rates, currency swaps, insane tax insentives, government contracts, bailouts, etc). Quality of product or customer satisfaction -- not that important. It has to be good enough that there are no scandals to tank your stock, hopefully.

I feel completely exhausted summarizing just that part of my professional life. Would not want to do it again.

One I worked for there were 5 of us. The product would "sell itself." It was pretty amazing, with massive market potential. The product was chemically impossible except for our way of making it. Spoiler alert: it didn't sell itself, competitors caught up and ate our lunch. You can buy their products at your local drug store and meanwhile all I have is a jar of this stuff and what should have been. Still a better story than my current gig though.

Interesting. It is a good story. You hear success stories, but there are so many near misses and complete failures no one hears about...

Do you think someone leaked it or was it one of those things that is not that hard to repeat once you know it's possible?

Sounds like a process patent... Did competitors hit upon it before priority date, or did they just work around the patent? I've had both things happen to me.

[I hate IP, but when in Rome...]

There are two main steps to make the product. (I am simplifying here.) It is somewhat obvious if you study it. Step one was in the public domain and extremely efficient. All the IP was around the catalysts to make the magic happen in step two (which was rate limiting) but it turns out there are dozens, possibly hundreds in nature that perform the same function (with varying efficiency) in this application. We locked up about 20 of them, some of them very efficient and some of them lousy. One competitor was stopped from using one but we lost our shirt doing it and they easily worked around the patent. Others just worked around the IP. The engineering to build this is all public domain.

My favorite fail involved an IP attorney I hired to negotiate with a large manufacturer/distributor in a specific market. Turned out he was more interested in getting the manufacturer as a client, and at one point asked me how one could work around my patent, in order to supposedly strengthen it and apply for supplemental patents. Like a fool I told him what I would do (which was pretty specific and not at all obvious), and a couple of days later the manufacturer did just that. The manufacturer told me that he 'had fulfilled all his legal and moral obligations' and told me to f**k off. The product has been a good seller in their catalog for over two decades now.

Oh, and I had to pay the attorney another fifteen thousand to avoid getting sued.

Wow that is pretty bad. I got offered a consulting gig basically doing the same thing, telling someone how to defeat my former company's patents. The offer was $150 for a one hour consultation but the screener questions were specific enough to get the required information without paying. I told them no thanks.

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