I really like this optimistic sentiment. And I think it’s true.
I work for a company that’s a unicorn this year. About five years ago it didn’t exist until Amazon decided to drop customer support for their warehouse robots, forcing a warehouse company to build its own replacements.
There is still plenty of room for new players to emerge.
This is the best time to be alive, because we can leverage their platforms (ex. google search, YT) to learn anything and everything to ultimately destroy them by building something different.
Just excited to live in a time where we (anyone with basic internet access pretty much) can execute runtime hacks on capitalism by changing the inputs a bit while still creating value where it matters to us.
Given the history of Facebook's acquisitions, I think this is a little optimistic. The sheer disgusting amount of money that FAANGs have allows them to buy or undercut any competitor that looks to gain steam.
Why sell though? One can always ignore being acquired if that's aligned with their mission.
Money is so plentiful these days, from personal experience you can just work for a FAANG/eqv. for max 4 years and amass at least 500k to a million bucks easily.
That's plenty money to bootstrap your company, and in some cases more than enough to cut out needing vulture- sorry I mean venture- capital for a good while or ever. Also, you can leverage free resources (like YC's videos, since we're on this site) and find VC related podcasts to understand how they work, so you can learn strategies on how to grow and completely avoid them.
Not to mention, 4 years will give you access to competent like-minded people (networking), a deeper understanding of how these companies operate and what to avoid/adopt, and if you're in a technical position you will most likely level up like crazy to the point you feel confident on learning any new tech and doing everything yourself. Don't know design? Attend some design workshops. Don't understand product marketing? Attend the workshop with the dude who wrote a book on how to do exactly that, and ask him questions. What does operational strategy mean? Attend that workshop.
These companies also have conferences and events where they bring leaders to speak and share their expertise- go to these and learn as much as you can.
The only resource that truly matters is time, so while you're alive, do execute. Just my 2 cents.
Yeah, that's a fair point. It's hard to evaluate such a decision without being in the spot. The only way I see of resisting such tempation would be to be fulfilled with working on your vision and have substantial amounts of money. I haven't done any of those things so it's hard to empathize and answer honestly.
At least we have warning examples such as Notch's situation. After making probably the most successful game of all time and selling it for billions, his life is (or was, has been, idk) reportedly pretty depressing.
I could say that it's better to not have depression than to have billions, but in reality it's not a zero sum game and you can probably have both. In the end, as always, it all depends on the person and their circumstances.
The old companies were pushed over by technological or organizational disruptions. A major disruption was paying significant premium money for premium talent, often more than twice the market rate for a given experience level and do that to everyone and not just to poach hires. All of the biggest tech companies do that today, but 20 years ago that was a huge disruption and caused many giants to fall from grace since they could no longer source quality talent. So unless a new similar disruption occurs there wont be something that pushes Google or Microsoft etc from their current positions.
I think it low-key already happening first now talent markets are global so I bet there is companies that are willing to pay premium for premium remote talent. Then there is companies like uniswap which are unicorns and there is like 20 people working that kinda opens situation where they can outbid even google for premium talent.
They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases.
Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.