I'm not sure why this is news. Planes have had first, business and economy classes since as long as I can remember, and everyone knows the feeling of walking through business class to get to your economy seat. Why are we shocked that now other businesses are following that exact same model? A more premium experience at a more premium price is pretty much business 101.
I'm a $5m+ Amazon seller here, so many wrong assumptions in the comments, hard to know where to begin...
- Firstly, not every Amazon seller is a drop shipper, or private label products. In fact most of the successful ones I know all design and brand their own unique products. We ourselves design everything in-house and own multiple design and utility patents on ALL of our products, you won't find these products on Alibaba. Yes, we manufacture in China, but it is really cost prohibitive and uncompetitive to do so almost anywhere else.
- Yes, Amazon's policies hurt us and is completely unethical. The biggest one being losing the "buy box" (ability for customer to buy from your brand) when a lower priced product from your brand is found on a competing website such as Target, Walmart, Shopify, etc. They essentially force you to have the best price possible on Amazon at all times or get severely punished. Why this is terrible... let me explain, let's say Walmart stores offer your product as a holiday sale item in their stores, or let's say a particular color variation of your product isn't doing well so they offer it as a clearance item. Now someone can buy that product at a discount, sell it back on a Target or Walmart online marketplace at a slightly lower price and guess what, your Amazon listing is now practically worthless. You lose the "buy box" and all your sales because another site has it listed for cheaper. This happens ALL THE TIME. And sometimes, there's almost nothing you can do about it.
- They practically force you to use Prime fulfillment. Technically you don't HAVE to use it, all you have to do is again, be uncompetitive with products that do offer Prime and lose half your sales. Same with Marketing, PPC, adwords, etc. They've created an ecosystem where all of these options aren't really options because there's no way to compete otherwise.
- Amazon basics and Amazon using private sales data to find out which products sell the best and compete with those brands directly. It's just really evil. They have all the info, all the data, and they know exactly which products to target to offer a cheaper version at a discounted price and steal all the sales...
I'll be the first to say that I owe Amazon a lot for allowing small businesses the opportunity to be making millions. But at the same time, some of the criticisms are valid, and with a few changes, the platform could be truly great for small business owners.
36 year old here, I've gotten Diamond in both Overwatch and Apex Legends and was an LEM CSGO player.
- I don't think reaction times matter as much as people think it does, positioning, movement, and general crosshair placement matter a lot more as does map knowledge and situational awareness.
- Having good equipment is pretty standard these days, a good GPU and gaming mouse + keyboard is almost a must have as well as a 144hz or higher refresh rate monitor.
- The biggest constraint on my ability to beat the best at an older age actually just comes down to how much time I can dedicate to the games. With a full time job, a wife, and 2 kids, gaming will always just be a side hobby and something I do with the little free time I have so I basically just don't practice as much as younger kids with more time. That's what 99% of it boils down to.
Are you always this cynical? There are plenty of good tech companies that have IPO'd recently: Snowflake, Unity, Corsair to name a few. I'm sure all three of those will do well in the coming years. Not everything is a bubble, these companies have some impressive growth numbers.
Is a fetus considered a human baby? This is one of those 2 sided debates that regularly occurs and the problem is that no amount of science will be able to give a definitive answer. It's a personal worldview and both sides have valid arguments.
Options aren't gambling, they're typically used to hedge your position, hence the 100:1 leverage. You can easily hedge out entire positions with just a few contracts.
It's not really a question of values because depending on what the actual death rate actually is, you can make informed objectionable decisions based off of it that two rational people with different values should agree upon. For example, if you determined that the risk of death from Covid was less than the risk of death from driving in a year, than I would argue that you should accept that risk if you're okay with driving.
Basically, in order to be rational, you should be willing to accept the risk of dying from Covid if it is less than something else you do that is more risky on a daily basis. So the idea that it is a question of morality and differing opinions of N and M isn't really accurate. It's also why we compare death rates from Covid to Influenza and other diseases because we need to understand just how big of a risk to society it actually is to properly weigh our response.
People make different decisions there too. Some drive recklessly, and some are super-conservative, exactly because of values.
But rationally, you wouldn't make determinations like the ones you're making. False->True isn't a helpful argument. COVID19 isn't the flu, and it isn't driving. Unfortunately, COVID is very, very dangerous, both in terms of death and in terms of long-term disability.
America has already lost more than the combat deaths of WWI and Vietnam combined, and that's with the level of shutdowns we've had. Many of the people who live seem to have horrible symptoms for months; it's too early to know long-term outcomes. In New York, 7.5% of the people who we know caught it died. You can apply whatever corrections you like for underreporting, etc. (and conversely, people who haven't died yet) but the death rate doesn't approach that of the flus or of driving.
If 20 million weren't unemployed, we didn't have achievement gaps, and the nation wasn't saddled with crippling fixed costs like debt, leases, and rents, we'd all be staying home. As is, it's a question of values.
As a founder that has built a VC backed business to $XXXM in revenue and now as a founder that has built a bootstrapped business to $XM in revenue I guess I'm in a unique position to answer this.
They both have their pros and cons as many people here have said. VCs allow for faster growth, greater risk taking, focus on other things such as culture and team, and sometimes you get tangential benefits such as PR and exposure. However, the downside is dilution, complicated cap table, growth at all costs (including profitability), infighting, differences in opinions and direction, and if you keep going down the VC path, ultimately you might realize you've built a company that doesn't feel like yours anymore. But hey, if you IPO one day at $XB dollars, everyone wins right?
For bootstrapping, the pros are you control your own destiny, work life balance can be great, you get to make all the decisions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. The cons are you live and die by your customers, growth can be sloooow, you have to watch every expense, money is always an issue, it's hard to pay employees top dollar.
There are ways to get money without VC, there are many small business loans out there, there's also friends and family which you can also get loans from, it also feels more real to live off of profit - which I think many companies in SV don't know how to do. You can also raise from Angels with non-traditional VC terms such as profit sharing.
As to which I personally prefer, I think there's something great about bootstrapping and living off profits. It's liberating and freeing... but I'd also be lying if I said that VC money doesn't tempt me every now and then. Ultimately I'm lucky in that we're profitable enough to grow at a decent clip without VC dollars so that's the best thing I can ask for... so for me, bootstrapping so far has been pretty great.
Conversely growth is exponential if you maintain margins. So the more you sell the more you have in the bank the more you can invest in growth. Sadly, exponential curves are very flat when you start out.
"There are ways to get money without VC, there are many small business loans out there, there's also friends and family which you can also get loans from,... You can also raise from Angels with non-traditional VC terms such as profit sharing."
For those developing hard technologies, there are also plenty of non-dilutive government grants. SBIRs are a popular funding mechanism that typically start in the $200k-$300k range and can go up to $millions if the technology goals are met. There are also many other government funding mechanisms, especially if your technology is health or defense related. The downside of all these government grants is (1) timing - it usually takes ~>6 months from proposal to $ in bank and (2) inflexible - if your plans change, it is not easy to pivot the use of the $.
