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AI startups with hyper ARR growth – what's happening inside these companies?

1 points by d675 ↗ HN
Seeing more and more people leave great big tech jobs or very smart new grads start AI companies that seem to hit $10m, $50m, $100m ARR incredibly quickly.

What’s actually going on inside these companies?

Are they profitable? How much are they burning? Are they really growing that fast? And are founders/employees building for the long term or basically aiming for an acquisition?

Would be interested to hear from anyone who’s worked at one of these companies.

Does it give you FOMO?

I'm starting as SRE @FAANG soon as a career switcher so that's cool in a brand new low level domain in storage. Out of my depth again given lack of knowledge but makes me wonder if a lot of these AI companies will have better outcomes.

11 comments

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ares623
It's VCs playing musical chairs. Startup A from VC Y signs up for an "enterprise" plan to Startup B, also from VC Y, and vice versa.
ThePhysicist
Reminds me of that joke with the two economists paying each other to eat shit from the street. In the end they accomplished nothing (actually it's way worse than that as they have eaten shit), still have the same amount of money as before, but made the GDP rise by twice that amount!
lucfranken
It's really hard to see anymore where the real money is made and what is a big facade. As it's really simple now to create a huge facade. Before it needed more work to show something big which was actually small. But now you can generate the show.

And there are actually some which are really big. But there are so many more overflowing the world with non existing businesses that it's hard to decipher what is real and what is not. It also makes learning from the successful ones way harder.

edimaudo
Those are astronomical figures to be honest. Unless someone shows you their books, skepticism should be the default
taurath
What’s happening is everyone is successful beyond their wildest dreams when raising the next round, and it used to be that you might find out more on exit but that’s getting more rare.

Now it’s a competition to be more manic than your competitors, and everyone has a gun out to shoot anyone who breaks the illusion of unlimited growth and unimaginable wealth

winter2
sure was thinking about the same thing man
thiago_fm
This will go on until the AI CAPEX starts to drain. But there's a chance that this never happens.

All that money being spent on NVidia GPUs has to become tokens which will be bought by a business.

Many of those AI businesses are making those LLMs do something useful, which makes sense.

But right now nobody has an idea how much a single token really costs.

Once the CAPEX has to start showing some real cashflow positive numbers, it's likely that the token prices will go up, margins will compress and a lot of businesses will go bankrupt.

Of course, if this even stops. We could keep going on forever if AGI/ASI arrives, then all our previous ideas about economics which is based on human labour mostly is outdated, and we will need to figure out new economics!

AznHisoka
No it does not give me FOMO. These stories are the most vocal. You never hear about the failures or the zombies