Want to hear the truth about #Automattic, the not-like-the-other-girls company that still thinks it is a startup after 20 years?

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

With the CEO who boast about his access to an international talent pool?

And the slogan "embrace the chaos" greeting you in all caps when you open the staff handbook?

Read on.

Riley S. Faelan

@alda FWIW, the startup theory is, a startup's job is to find business models. I know of only a very few companies that even arguably pulled off doing it serially, but, considering what we know of business psychology, it should be possible to arrange a company in such a way that stays a start-up indefinitely, and the fruits of its work are regular spin-offs of new companies operating in no-longer-startup modes.

(Not making a case that this particular one is even close to pulling the University Mode off, only that indefinite start-up is not inherently a contradiction in terms.)

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@riley I think that to a lot of people, a startup is simply a company that is burning someone else's money.

Riley S. Faelan

@alda That's only because most startups don't have their own money to burn, and greedy vulture capitalists have learnt since the '90s that by burning their money in somebody else's startups, they get to go from rich to richer on the backs of people trying to scrape together their first million (and failing).

:blahaj: Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑

@riley @alda of course then you have the percentage of "startups" that are, or at least becomes very quickly, a pyramid scheme where the guy on top sells it after a few years of living on other people's money and repeats the process with a new one.

Riley S. Faelan

@WhyNotZoidberg These will be considered the success stories, and angelised by the press.

@alda

Asta [AMP]

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