ipfs and filecoin are extremely successful. I am surprised they can't fund the team from filecoin treasury. Maybe they overhired and used the downturn as a reason to correct? This might also be an example of how many orgs in and around web3 have trouble monetizing because they end up building public goods. Which is ironic given the glut of money in web3.
What am I missing? Both seem to be getting less attention nowadays than they did a few years ago, and while I'd give IPFS that it actually works and seems usable for some things, as you say it doesn't pay the bills.
As far as I can tell, most (if not all) of "web3" is in what I would consider to be the pre-product-market-fit stage. These things have believers, of course, and the believers generate activity. But I'm not seeing a lot of real-world economic activity that could only be solved with "web3" approaches, or even ones where "web3" technologies provide significant cost reductions.
So what signs are there for people who don't go to crypto-church that there are functional businesses here?
Layoffs aren't about need. That's the cozy "we're all in this together" narrative that they keep feeding you. They probably can fund these people, as you say. But layoffs are fashionable today.
Right. The _unspoken truth_ in all of these announcements is that _the CEO failed at their one job of keeping the company disciplined_ but it's the _rank and file_ who suffer the consequences of the "tough decision". It's a "not subtle at all" power check to calculated to intimidate the unfortunate people who remain. They've wanted to do this so bad for so long: it's why they kept feeding the media the weak "great resignation" narrative that they lapped up and regurgitated on HN and elsewhere.
> Maybe they overhired and used the downturn as a reason to correct?
What downturn?
I understand Amazon is reporting poor results, but they seem to be mostly due to reporting losses from past investments that didn't panned out yet, like Rivian.
But it's not like each and every tech turn in the world has invested in Rivian.
This is a consequence of money getting more expensive. When rates are low, investors pile money into non-revenue producing startups in hopes that something will return 1000x. Now rates are up and the smart money is moving elsewhere.
> Now rates are up and the smart money is moving elsewhere.
That would only explain drops in future investments, but we're seeing profitable companies with astronomical revenues from their cash cows diving into a massive firing spiral.
More importantly, growing interest rates is not exactly the definition of a downturn.
In terms of people deciding to invest in a company, high interest rates definitely make future revenue less valuable in terms of discounted cash flow models.
Growing interest rates propagate throughout the economy. The goal of higher interest rates (aside from debt & borrowing becoming substantially more expensive) is to bring down demand and slow the economy.
> Alphabet: 34% decline in revenue. Fourth consecutive quarter of declining revenues.
That does not sound factual at all. Where did you picked that up? According to Variety, Alphabet's revenue on Q4 2022 was $76.05 billion and up 1% in spite of a 8% ad revenue drop.
Still, regarding profit, I'm not sure that firing people in profitable companies effectively contributes to higher profits. Sure, you pay fewer salaries. However, that comes at a cost, such as supposedly cutting programs the company deemed valuable and eroding the company's ability to conduct their business.
Also, it seems Google's reaction to drops in profit was to fire 6% of their staff. Does that even register in Google's accounting? I mean, payroll is typically 20-30% of a healthy company's expenditure.
And would a hiring freeze not reach the same goal without causing any disruption? I mean, apparently Google is still hiring and has a large volume of job openings. If the amount of people in their payroll is too much as is then why are they hiring even more?
Do you have any figures on real usage? Neither seem to have much traction and with interest rates rising I’d expect investors are putting more pressure on them to demonstrate real profits rather than the paper valuations which have characterized web3 so far. The biggest thing I’d expect to see for IPFS is profitably selling storage at competitive prices. If you can’t match S3 or Dropbox it’s unclear what market they could possibly have to justify even the reduced headcount.
IPFS is an open protocol à la BitTorrent and not about selling storage; Filecoin is about selling storage.
There are S3/Dropbox-like solutions on top of Filecoin. I’ve not deeply researched the economics of them, but some of them have competitive or better prices
Yes, I’m aware of what IPFS is - the point being that it’s been around for 8 years but seems to have rather little impact. For a company which has raised a quarter of a billion in real dollars and has a coin ostensibly valued over $2B, you’d expect to see some serious ongoing revenue from people paying for services because they do something better than the alternatives.
When you look at services using IPFS, be sure to look for hard statements about reliability. One of the recurring weird aspects about IPFS is that people talk like it guarantees durable storage without needing to pay for redundant copies.
Every discussion that I can find about IPFS on Hacker News has revolved around it not being useful.
In March 2020, Filecoin was trading around $185. Today it’s under $6.
I don’t see either of those as extremely successful.
Moreover, I doubt there is enough buyer interest in Filecoin to support funding developer salaries with “Filecoin treasury.” I suspect that any significant sale of Filecoin would tank the coin’s value.
