The Indian startup bubble is insane

(ashishb.net)

11 points | by ashishb 69 days ago

2 comments

  • shehjar 69 days ago
    Demand and supply is playing a big role in the valuations.

    One could argue that absent a MnA ecosystem, investors only have a handful of opportunities to multiply their investment. It leads to simple handing-off to next round investors as the one and perhaps only opportunity to get returns on the funds.

    Only recently has the ecosystem understood the potential for IPO in India as a potential for exit.

    • ashishb 69 days ago
      That's true, but I wonder why these late-stage investors are investing at these valuations with complete disregard for capital efficiency.
      • shehjar 69 days ago
        My guess is, late stage investors are bringing money from a different class of LPs, who aren’t looking for asset classes that grow 20x.
        • ashishb 69 days ago
          Leave 20X. My concern is that some of these can't even retain their valuations (Oyo and Byju are valued below their total funding amounts already).
          • shehjar 69 days ago
            You are right and I am simply putting myself in the shoes of the late stage investors. Perhaps they have been sold a story the drives confidence in a 2X return. When the story doesn’t hold up, there isn’t much of a multiples buffer to prevent losing money.
  • matrix87 69 days ago
    I have no interest in using postman after they trashed all of my requests and subsequently tried forcing me to tie an account to it

    it's literally just an http client with a UI, better luck next time

    • yunohn 69 days ago
      > it's literally just an http client with a UI, better luck next time

      This is the exact toxic dismissive attitude that leads to OSS software going the payment-gated route.

      • matrix87 68 days ago
        isn't that the point of OSS software? vendor makes a bunch of user-hostile changes, people get pissed and fork it.

        if they wanted to be hostile towards users, then OSS was a mistake

        • yunohn 68 days ago
          The reason we end up with user hostile changes, is because the dev user community is cannibalistically stingy. This cycle will continue forever, until people stop dismissing others work as “curl with a UI” or “curl with FTP” and refusing to pay for anything.
    • ashishb 69 days ago
      Yeah, never understood the charm of it either. My favorite is Bruno (https://github.com/usebruno/bruno), one can even commit its text-based files to version control. Insomnia is probably better but had a major fiasco last year - https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577
      • yunohn 69 days ago
        Bruno didn’t exist until ~2yrs ago and was created as a reactionary alternative to Postman’s changes. What did you use before that?
        • ashishb 68 days ago
          I used curl before that. But I can see how curl will be intimidating for non-engineers.

          Now, I recommend Bruno to even non-engineers.

          • yunohn 68 days ago
            Notwithstanding your judgment of others’ ability to use curl - I wouldn’t compare API clients to curl at all.

            Clients like Postman/Bruno provide private/shared request libraries, detailed customization of the request/response, automated load and behavior testing, syntax highlighting and formatting, pretty printing and so much more.

            • ashishb 67 days ago
              > Clients like Postman/Bruno provide private/shared request libraries, detailed customization of the request/response, automated load and behavior testing, syntax highlighting and formatting, pretty printing and so much more.

              For all engineers

                - detailed customization of the request/response - Python scripts
                - syntax highlighting - bat
                - pretty printing - jq
                - automated load and behavior testing - several specialized tools
              • yunohn 67 days ago
                This feels like a worse version of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
                • ashishb 61 days ago
                  The comparison to Dropbox is incorrect. But rather than trying to explain that, I will wait a few years and let the market decide whether my concerns are legitimate.
                • matrix87 61 days ago
                  well played I guess

                  but a side question, how did you find that comment? is there a listing of historic hn comments somewhere?

      • matrix87 69 days ago
        hmm looks like they forked the pre-enshittified version of insomnia https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium
        • ashishb 69 days ago
          What you linked to seems to be in archive and read-only mode already.