Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees
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yep, the business model of "become valuable so we get bought out" seems to be going the way of the dodo. good riddance.
Oh i think it will come back. It is profitable.
Especially when the Fed cuts rates deep this year in a bid to save Biden.
Venture Capital Investment, in general, destroys the value of a company.
The VC model, more or less, goes like this:
In reality, VC needs to achieve returns that are better than other, comparable investments. While there are inconsistencies in the market, a simple indexed fund can make about 10% year on year with (relatively) low risk and (relatively) low cost.
So it follows that VC needs an investment to make better than 10% year on year. Few companies can make anything like this as sustained growth. Moreover, the longer the investment continues before a sale the more money the VC requires to meet their target.
There are really only a few big companies who have the kind of funds to splash around on new technology acquisitions. If you can't catch the attention of Google, Microsoft, GM or the like, then a high value sale is very unlikely.
With a bit of thought, we can see that the business model of a company that has received a large VC investment is totally different to another company in the field. VC company isn't focused on good service, steady growth or customer satisfaction; they need the company to grow quickly and be very attractive for a buyout. Their product is actually the company itself, and the market is potential investors, not whatever widgets or services they sell to the public.
The reality is that VC adds a huge expense to any potential company sale. VC puts enormous pressure on the company to sell out in two or five years. There is huge, cutthroat competition to sell to the tech giants or industry leaders.
Profitable startups that have received VC investment and then gone on to sale and success, more or less, originate with YCombinator and nowhere else. Even then, almost all YCombinator alumni have been zombie companies. That is, companies that subsist on VC investment but do not have a successful business model.
If it interests you, I can discuss why VC almost universally makes shitty investments.
Examples of YCombinator Zombie Companies include Reddit and Twitch. In fact, almost everything on the top 50 list of YCombinator companies is a Zombie company. Perhaps AirBnB is profitable now? They were having huge issues with insurance, but that might be solved.
I'm happy to discuss this more if anyone cares. I spent literally a year of my life learning about VC investment and how to chase it before deciding it was mostly shit.
tldr: Venture Capital Investment is a shitty business model. Bankers and accountants, who know nothing about the technical risks of a venture, invest vast amounts of money chasing one-in-a-million long-shot because Facebook did it once. Almost all VC money is invested badly and written off as a loss.
Not ESG directly, just an outcome of the near 0% interest rates and QE practices the Fed has kept rolling along for years. If you can get billions of dollars in loans that you only have to pay back at pennies on the dollar, that is basically free money.
The other parts of the western world were doing it too and wrecking normal peoples savings, other businesses etc.
Not ESG just weird start ups that knew how to exploit venture capitalists until they couldn't anymore. Things like HQ Trivia which literally had no ability to generate revenue lasting for years by going "well we have so much marketing data!" And then ran out of suckers willing to buy into the company.
I feel like ESG was ironically intended to be some sort of counter to the tradition of companies outsourcing everything to other countries and burning and churning through employees.
This is the official propagandy narrative, in my experience it was mostly just outsourcing to other continents.
New manager would come in, move the work over to a remote consulting company they were associated with, then start firing/laying off people.
In retrospect maybe I should have seen if I could have done that myself I bet the kickbaccks from the overseas consulting companies were notable. You'll end up without a job either way might as well cash in on it.
And from really big virtue signaling companies too.
I still don't know what "owner's equivalent rent" is, but it sounds like made-up bullshit to dilute actual rent increases.
Every part of official CPI is designed to hide inflation.
It's what it sounds like. It's the rent that would be equal to the overall cost of owning a home.
Basically they use it to say that if renting an apartment costs $700 a month with utilities it's better to rent than to own a home with a $600 mortgage and $300 in utilities and upkeep.
Basically it's a "you will own nothing and be happy" cope.
The fact that MSNBC spent the last couple weeks of 2023 literally screaming how a recession was effectively impossible, and that people who believed that a recession needed to prove their case; shows that their job was to get everybody's gullible money into positions to off-load at the peak of prices, before everything went to shit.
I don't think anyone's getting out of this one.
Yea, in the last few days it was Twitch, Disney and now Discord. All about 15-20% IIRC. Did I miss someone?
The world is healing ... or something :D
Edit: Unity too, 25%