alt Hacker NewsPG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.