> I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.
At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
> At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
All this is true for many other products, specifically cars. Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
I get it, Apple has much better margins than Ford. And maybe a iPhone 18 Mini would reduce total margin for them. But if they move a couple of million units, it absolutely would make money.
> Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
Of course, they never even brought it to the US. It has no chance there, there's barely a market for lowslung station wagons, and close to no market for EV wagons. Always was a niche in the US, while it was always the primary family vehicle in Europe.
And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).
Society doesn't do anything of the sort. This is just diffuse irrational thinking. People invest their wealth where it will make the most profit for them and if a marginal dollar investment into the regular iPhone brings more profit than one into the iPhone Mini, then the owners and shareholders will ask the CEO why their money is flowing into suboptimal productions. People put their money investing in Apple in the hopes of a good return on that investment. If you want them to produce something that doesn't give them a good return, you'd have to pay to compensate, ie the price would rise but people wouldn't be ready to pay that. Otherwise you're asking people to subsidize for your enjoyment some luxury product as if it was charity. Willingly foregoing profit for the sake of someone else is subsidy or charity.
6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
I've known Ryan for those 10 years, back when we met at Morgan Stanley. He is one of the most persistent and hard working engineers I know.
To people asking why he's giving it away for free: partially because it's content marketing (duh), but mostly because this has been a labor of love for him that he wants to let loose into the world.
There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China.
It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible.
There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this
seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up.
but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.
Going from small -> large zone WORKS, and is what Facebook did. (Harvard -> more colleges -> general availability). The thing that makes it work is a sense of exclusivity. Small (can) == cool. And you can capitalize on that a bit.
It's a worrying trend, especially for those of us in startup land. With the Figma deal following through and less companies going public, the assembly line funding model is showing some serious cracks.
The entire model of startups taking on lots of VC funding, burning it over a few years to acquire customers and then having a big exit, all without bothering with a business plan or making a single dollar in profit, is basically over.
The reason VC funding is drying up, big unicorns aren't going public and acquisitions are halted is that investors are actually starting to drill into the numbers now, and finding nothing but hot air.
I'm okay with this. Very little good has come from this. How many of the social platforms would be where they are now if they had to fund themselves differently?
Real question: When will Stripe go public? That has to be the biggest unicorn in years. And barrier to entry is quite high, so they have built a nice moat. I wonder if the VCs push them to go public.
its only worrying if you can't make a sustainable standalone business at the end of the day.
Which should be the goal. A major acquisition should have always been seen as a last resort, only preferable to going out of business.
Startups hoping to cash out by selling to a competitor is its own kind of silliness in the first place and was largely fueled by lax regulation environments and 0% interest cash.
What ever happened to building durable businesses as an explicit goal
A lot of big businesses don't start off as sustainable ones. So they buy time, through venture capital, to become sustainable ones. This kind of news hurts the chances of that category of companies from being created.
I didn't posit that a business should start off as a sustainable one.
I asked what happened to building a durable business as a goal?
I understand the VC model enough to know that sometimes for years you run red because you need economies of scale or some other engine to finally turn over and then at scale the business will start to generate bigger cash flow once it reaches that tipping point. Even if a bit simplified as an explanation, this isn't what I'm talking about.
What I'm asking directly is why exiting to a big company became a goal in and of itself. Lots of VCs poured money into companies with the distinct hope that those businesses would at the very least be acquired. I think this is the silly part. Every investment should be from the perspective of can this be durable if standing on its own two feet? and a big acquisition is not something that should be taken into consideration as part of the investment and business building strategy of either the VC firms or the founders.
That all got lost. Building a durable business should be the ultimate goal, and selling the business to a big company should be seen as lower status than it currently is.
Its not that I'm saying acquisitions don't make sense sometimes, I'm not. However as far as goal setting and running a business is concerned, it shouldn't really be thought about as a viable fallback or exit strategy until its readily apparent and available, but that hasn't been true for some time now. VCs and founders often explicitly look at acquisition as one of their "success targets" and hopes for a business. Lots of people on HN have admitted that they started businesses with some hopes that they could possibly be acquired. That is the drift away from sanity I'm talking about.
Every single founder I know (and I know a lot of them) doesn't build a business for the specific reason to be acquired. Is it a thought that crosses their mind? Definitely. Is it something investors think about? Absolutely.
But the day-to-day, 12 hour+ grind for them is all about product-market fit and drawing revenue - the things that make a durable business.
Which big businesses are that? And how many categories of sustainable mid-sized companies creating a healthy competing market were hurt with VC cash flood, where VC fed companies dumped prices, killed healthy competition and then died themselves (together with whole product categories) when the VCs lost interest because they weren't a unicorn?
Those mid sized companies you refer to did fine for three reasons:
* If they were competing against venture backed companies, they were likely playing in big markets. My bet is they are still alive today.
* They got acquired by the bigger companies and ended up capturing even more short term economic value than they would have otherwise.
* These venture backed companies expanded the market, actually helping smaller players. I would bet money that VRBO's business increased as AirBnB got bigger.
I agree that there's something sleazy about injecting a ton of capital in a niche space; at the very least, it's distorts all the dynamics in it. But you can't deny that this short term chaos creates long term economic value for everyone else.
Uber demonstrated you could add a tech layer to the taxi business and make it more efficient for riders + introduce a whole new set of people to the driver business. Did this harm existing taxi drivers? Unquestionably.
I know it's hard to look at that business model as innovation but it is because now there's extreme price pressure on these companies (esp Lyft) to remove the costliest part of the equation - the driver. So as a result, you have a ton of very motivated energy towards solving that, via autonomous driving.
It took mediocre business innovation[0] (uber) to drive meaningful tech innovation (autonomous driving).
[0] - Purposely differentiating the tech innovation (which Uber deserves a lot of credit for) vs the biz innovation (which last I read is getting better, though still shaky).
There's just no world in which the market leader ought to be able to buy their #1 competitor, particularly in a deal where the economics ($10b on $300m rev) only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. I have no idea what these folks were thinking.
For the employees at Figma, their shot at cashing out evaporated when the Adobe deal was called off. I know people who were ready to leave Github in the past, but their manager told them to wait a bit, there’s a big acquisition coming and their equity would be worth sizeably more.
So here’s one of those scenarios: you’re working at Figma. Perhaps you’re burned out or just want to try out something different. This acquisition deal with Adobe has been signed and you’re grinding through the days waiting for your chance to cash in on the years of work with Figma that have nearly paid off. Then this happens.
This affects startups similarly. The non IPO exit path got that much less attractive.
Equity ETFs or bond ETFs? If equity, I guess the max you can get is 4% yield, which is still worse that money market, plus you take equity risk. If bond ETFs, they will tank when rates fall. I never understand the appeal of bond ETFs; money market funds are enough for my fixed income needs. They are basic, easy to understand, liquid, etc.
Temporarily-not-an-unicorn companies will need to raise more money to become a unicorn. If those investors don't see light at the end of the tunnel, these companies get squeezed.
I hope not. I'd like to see people start building sustainable businesses intended to last and stop the whole cycle of accumulating users and hoping to get acquired before the funding runs out.
I think the ecosystem is healthier for Figma and Adobe remaining separate.
> We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.”
This is an extreme position. More likely, we are seeing repricing occur. There are still worthy, venture backable ideas. Probably less of them than in the past.
It was my favorite job I've ever had. It was intense in the best way. I didn't have much contact with Budnitz, but the other 6 founders showed such a strong passion for the community, it was impossible for me to not to come to work excited.
I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
A few learnings:
- 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
- Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of.
- Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
This. Time is precious, many good options already exist, and it's hard to do well, particularly in such a way that it doesn't cause unnecessary friction later. Unless your business _is_ building a UI framework, it's probably not integral to the business, thus acts as a pretty big distraction that isn't easy to pivot into a business itself.
I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders.
One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.
You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations mean that it’s very different than say, B2B SaaS.
-an iPhone mini fan
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