O'Reilly: Exit-driven startups are financial products, not real companies
Tim O'Reilly · a16z Podcast | Platforming the Future · Jan 2, 2019 · at 24:40
Tim O'Reilly, tech publisher and author of WTF?, contrasts early Silicon Valley founders with modern startups focused on rapid acquisition exits.
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“And there was a time when the goal of a startup was to build a real business. You know, you think about you know, the founders of Silicon Valley, they didn't have any idea that they were going to get acquired. They had the idea that they were going to build a business doing this new thing, and now you have an awful lot of companies where the goal from day one is the exit, and where the behavior is targeted towards the exit. So that makes them, to me, financial products rather than companies.”
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