If self driving cars take off, Lyft will be the computing network that manages on-demand transportation including via self-driving cars. Not at all a short term business.

Pretty sure Google is going to be the system that manages self-driving cars. No other organization has shown able to manage data at the scale they do.

Can you expand on why Lyft would beat out another competitor like Uber, Sidecar or Google?

(I'm honestly curious and interested in learning more!)

Fixed now.

Are you sure? I still see a page full of ugly pixelated courier-esque font, with 3px-wide "i" characters distracting from being able to read anything. (Chrome/XP)

Please, bloggers of the world. If you don't understand fonts or how to correctly embed fonts into a web page in a way that looks good cross-platform and not just on your machine, just use web-safe fonts.

LOL! Fair point :-)

Completely agree.

Im not frowning on credentialing. The question I have is whether we are becoming too credential-obsessed in Silicon Valley rather than focusing entirely on what matters: building companies of consequence.

If this is ever a customer objection that actually prevents a deal, the prospect probably just does not want your service that badly and is reaching for an excuse to not sign.

I certainly think that's a possibility but I think you're overstating how much they are rationalizing in your analysis.

There is certainly an extra lack of confidence in startups because of the "find a big exit!" culture and the growing trend for aqui-hiring.

As if it wasn't hard enough as a startup to attract customers, this perception is certainly not helping.

Out of all the issues bootstrapped startups face, I really don't think "other startups may be acqui-hired and poison our well." should be a concern. The vast majority of startups that fail do so because they poison their own well

This is one of the most ignorant, poorly written articles I've ever seen on Hacker News. it doesn't belong here.

It may not be a conscious conspiracy by the big boys but the reality of the startup scene isn't too far from what he describes.

Edit: I'd also say that a certain section of startups are in on the game too - how many startups can you recall where their sole raison d'être and exit strategy was to be acquired by Google, Facebook or Apple? The dropboxes and facebooks of the startup world are much more rare.

Indeed. A lot of it comes from the lack of other exit-options. Large companies aren't cool anymore, so nobody wants their startup to become one --- that's just a means to the end of a big payout. Getting acquired is substantially less work than being a full-on success, and avoids a lot of the drudgework of the middle/large-stage parts of a company's lifecycle.

Back a dozen years ago (omg, has it really been that long now?), you'd IPO and use all that new money to hire people to take care of the actual business management for you. A founder could get back to hacking on new, fun stuff, or let his board bribe him to step down :-)

I debated not submitting it, but I thought the idea warranted some discussion. Seems like every other day I read about a startup with a free service shutting down because they were bought by Facebook, Twitter, or Google.

I didn't read the article, but...the intelligent discussion around it meant that I didn't have to waste my time reading what sounds like a lousy article. Had I found this article on my own, I would have both had to suffer through the article and been deprived the intelligent teardown of it we get here. That alone makes me glad it was submitted. (Only half kidding here.)

Why is he being downvoted? This is seriously one of the dumbest articles I have ever read.

He's being down voted because it's so easy to call something "ignorant" without backing it up. Just like it's easy to call something "one of the dumbest articles" without backing it up. No argument, no proof, no reasoning… down votes.

I agree.

They're constantly supportive, always helpful, never intrusive. The best.

The amount of hype these guys had measured against the ultimate outcome just underscores that it is really, really hard to build a real business... and much easier to get press. Kudos to them for trying. This is a downer.