It’s possible no one tried literally “recreate OkC”, but I think dating startups are very oversubscribed by founders, relative to interest from VCs [1][2][3] (and I think VCs are mostly correct that they won’t make money [4][5]).
(Edit: I want to note that those are things I found after a bit of googling to see if my sense of the consensus was borne out; they are meant in the spirit of “several samples of weak evidence”)
I don’t particularly believe you that OkC solves dating for a significant fraction of people. IIRC, a previous time we talked about this, @romeostevensit suggested you had not sufficiently internalised the OkCupid blog findings about how much people prioritised physical attraction.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
I think it’s fine to lament our lack of good mechanisms for public good provision, and claim our society is failing at that. But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
I agree that more people should be starting revenue-funded/bootstrapped businesses (including ones enabled by software/technology).
The meme is that if you’re starting a tech company, it’s going to be a VC-funded startup. This is, I think, a meme put out by VCs themselves, including Paul Graham/YCombinator, and it conflates new software projects and businesses generally with a specific kind of business model called the “tech startup”.
Not every project worth doing should be a business (some should be hobbies or donation-funded) and not every business worth doing should be a VC-funded startup (some should be bootstrapped and grow from sales revenue.)
The VC startup business model requires rapid growth and expects 30x returns over a roughly 5-10 year time horizon. That simply doesn’t include every project worth doing. Some businesses are viable but are not likely to grow that much or that fast; some projects shouldn’t be expected to be profitable at all and need philanthropic support.
I think the narrative that “tech startups are where innovation happens” is...badly incomplete, but still a hell of a lot more correct than “tech startups are net destructive”.
Think about new technologies; then think about where they were developed. That process can ever happen end-to-end within a startup, but more often I think innovative startups are founded around IP developed while the founders were in academia; or the startup found a new use for open-source tools or tools developed within big companies. There simply isn’t time to solve particularly hard technical problems if you have to get to profitability and 30x growth in 5 years. The startup format is primarily designed for finding product-market fit—i.e. putting together existing technologies, packaging them as a “product” with a narrative about what and who it’s for, and tweaking it until you find a context where people will pay for the product, and then making the whole thing bigger and bigger. You can do that in 5 years. But no, you can’t do literally all of society’s technological innovation within that narrow context!
(Part of the issue is that we still technically count very big tech companies as “startups” and they certainly qualify as “Silicon Valley”, so if you conflate all of “tech” into one big blob it includes the kind of big engineering-heavy companies that have R&D departments with long time horizons. Is OpenAI a “tech startup”? Sure, in that it’s a recently founded technology company. But it is under very different financial constraints from a YC startup.)
But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
Neither of those, exactly.
I’m claiming that the narrative around the startup scene is that they are virtuous engines of [humane] value creation (often in counter to a reactionary narrative that “big tech” is largely about exploitation and extraction). It’s about “changing the world” (for the better).
This opportunity seems like a place where one could have traded meaningfully large personal financial EV for enormous amounts of humane value. Apparently no founder wanted to take that trade. Because I would expect there to be variation in how much funders are motivated by money vs. making a mark on the world vs. creating value vs. other stuff, that fact that (to my knowledge) no founder went for it, is evidence about the motivations of the whole founder class. The number of founders who are more interested in creating something that helps a lot of people than they are in making a lot of money (even if they’re interested in both) is apparently very small.
Now, maybe startups actually do create lots of humane value, even if they’re created by founders and VC’s motivated by profit. The motivations of of the founders are only indirect evidence about the effects of startups.
But the tech scene is not motivated to optimize for this at all?? That sure does update me about how much the narrative is true vs. propaganda.
Now if I’m wrong and old OkCupid was only drastically better for me and my unusually high verbal intelligence friends, and it’s not actually better than the existing offerings for the vast majority of people, that’s a crux for me.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
Manifold.Love is going into maintenance mode while we focus on our core product. We hope to return with improvements once we have more bandwidth; we’re still stoked on the idea of a prediction market-based dating app!
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
It’s possible no one tried literally “recreate OkC”, but I think dating startups are very oversubscribed by founders, relative to interest from VCs [1] [2] [3] (and I think VCs are mostly correct that they won’t make money [4] [5]).
(Edit: I want to note that those are things I found after a bit of googling to see if my sense of the consensus was borne out; they are meant in the spirit of “several samples of weak evidence”)
I don’t particularly believe you that OkC solves dating for a significant fraction of people. IIRC, a previous time we talked about this, @romeostevensit suggested you had not sufficiently internalised the OkCupid blog findings about how much people prioritised physical attraction.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
I think it’s fine to lament our lack of good mechanisms for public good provision, and claim our society is failing at that. But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
If this is true, it’s somewhat cruxy for me.
I’m still disappointed that no one cared enough to solve this problem without VC funding.
I agree that more people should be starting revenue-funded/bootstrapped businesses (including ones enabled by software/technology).
The meme is that if you’re starting a tech company, it’s going to be a VC-funded startup. This is, I think, a meme put out by VCs themselves, including Paul Graham/YCombinator, and it conflates new software projects and businesses generally with a specific kind of business model called the “tech startup”.
Not every project worth doing should be a business (some should be hobbies or donation-funded) and not every business worth doing should be a VC-funded startup (some should be bootstrapped and grow from sales revenue.)
The VC startup business model requires rapid growth and expects 30x returns over a roughly 5-10 year time horizon. That simply doesn’t include every project worth doing. Some businesses are viable but are not likely to grow that much or that fast; some projects shouldn’t be expected to be profitable at all and need philanthropic support.
I think the narrative that “tech startups are where innovation happens” is...badly incomplete, but still a hell of a lot more correct than “tech startups are net destructive”.
Think about new technologies; then think about where they were developed. That process can ever happen end-to-end within a startup, but more often I think innovative startups are founded around IP developed while the founders were in academia; or the startup found a new use for open-source tools or tools developed within big companies. There simply isn’t time to solve particularly hard technical problems if you have to get to profitability and 30x growth in 5 years. The startup format is primarily designed for finding product-market fit—i.e. putting together existing technologies, packaging them as a “product” with a narrative about what and who it’s for, and tweaking it until you find a context where people will pay for the product, and then making the whole thing bigger and bigger. You can do that in 5 years. But no, you can’t do literally all of society’s technological innovation within that narrow context!
(Part of the issue is that we still technically count very big tech companies as “startups” and they certainly qualify as “Silicon Valley”, so if you conflate all of “tech” into one big blob it includes the kind of big engineering-heavy companies that have R&D departments with long time horizons. Is OpenAI a “tech startup”? Sure, in that it’s a recently founded technology company. But it is under very different financial constraints from a YC startup.)
Neither of those, exactly.
I’m claiming that the narrative around the startup scene is that they are virtuous engines of [humane] value creation (often in counter to a reactionary narrative that “big tech” is largely about exploitation and extraction). It’s about “changing the world” (for the better).
This opportunity seems like a place where one could have traded meaningfully large personal financial EV for enormous amounts of humane value. Apparently no founder wanted to take that trade. Because I would expect there to be variation in how much funders are motivated by money vs. making a mark on the world vs. creating value vs. other stuff, that fact that (to my knowledge) no founder went for it, is evidence about the motivations of the whole founder class. The number of founders who are more interested in creating something that helps a lot of people than they are in making a lot of money (even if they’re interested in both) is apparently very small.
Now, maybe startups actually do create lots of humane value, even if they’re created by founders and VC’s motivated by profit. The motivations of of the founders are only indirect evidence about the effects of startups.
But the tech scene is not motivated to optimize for this at all?? That sure does update me about how much the narrative is true vs. propaganda.
Now if I’m wrong and old OkCupid was only drastically better for me and my unusually high verbal intelligence friends, and it’s not actually better than the existing offerings for the vast majority of people, that’s a crux for me.
From their retrospective:
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
That’s a PR friendly way of saying that it failed to reach PMF.