iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

For those unfamiliar with the startup game: every founder wants to raise funding rounds to increase valuation until they "exit" (sell the company to Google) The best way to increase valuation is not to make a good product, but to raise hype by "collecting logos" (signing big companies as customers)

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Startups offer massive subsidies to customers to get them to sign - just like OpenAI etc offered even their paid services at low prices at first. So they need infusions of cash (through these funding rounds) to keep collecting customers - and building hype for subsequent, bigger funding rounds.

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themattbass.bsky.social @themattbass.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Don’t forget so many startup pitch their product as “disruption”, aka slightly different versions of existing “things”. Then things become unsustainable and that “exit” consists of the user base data as the product being purchased, not the product “tool”.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

This funding is critical to the slop waterfall, because upstream companies desperately need that money and those logos to sustain their own hype. What happens when the prices get too high and the end customer decides it's cheaper to just go back to hiring humans to do the job once (and properly)?

futurism.com

Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology's screwups.

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