How shutdown Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear fast

I live in Stockholm and there are _tons_ of stores like that here, Stockholm is one of the big startup centers of Europe. The difference is that most them just sell IKEA furniture because that is what all the offices buy...

Although to be honest the IKEA standing tables are quite good, I own one myself (bought from one of those stores). Some of the ikea chairs are good but not top-notch.

The failed startups are a vital part of the Aeron economy, putting these back-savers into circulation at 1/3 of MSRP

Do you think it's still there? I wouldn't mind getting a fancy office chair at discount.

I always called 2.0 the "Steelcase Employment Project"

There’s a place in London Bridge called something like ‘London office furniture’ that regularly sells Aeron chairs for about 100 quid

Yeah! I don't know if it's still there but I kitted out my first company's office with chairs from there! It was a cool place.

There's also a junk shop, for want it a better phrase, just off the top of Brick Lane that is similar, it has office stuff but also way more general stuff too.

It doesn't even have a GM listing but it's here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CWDZ3goLKXeJb3eAA?g_st=ac

The mural on the wall is of the guy who used to own the shop. He'd sit outside all day in his car. I can't remember his name now but he was famous locally.

Would you sit in such a "haunted" chair if you're just launching your own startup though?

> Taking the money of some clueless holder of money - optimistically calling themselves as investors, never as suckers for sure - and fraud away.

Generally, investors in early-ish-stage startups, that is those which are most likely to unexpectedly implode, scattering office furniture all over the place, know very well what they're getting into; they're specialist VCs who invest in, say, 50 startups in the hope that two or three will be worth something.

Though, the nature of the game is that sometimes, one of these will have a truly massive breakout success, by accident, and it will totally screw up their view of risk from then on, leading them to put vast amounts of money into things which could not possibly work. Looking at you, Softbank.

This has been the way since the first internet boom in the early 2000s. The successes make too much money for it to be any other way.

Overt fraud (sometimes known as "long firm" fraud) is rarer than you think, but there are the Theranos companies out there. Then things with very questionable payment structures like WeWork.

This is also why "qualified investor" rules exist in the US. People briefly got into cryptocurrency (ICOs) as a way round this, which really is an all scam all the time economy.

Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail. All for the sake of temporarily using some fancy office furniture.

I have a theory that extreme levels of VC investment mean, relative to whatever ownership shares the employees doing the actual work get, the original VCs have extreme ownership over whatever profits the business might generate (including from an IPO/sale).

Well, that’s just a fact. But my theory is that this ultimately incentivizes the employees to invest in their own skills and maximizing their salary-earning potential, rather than making the business succeed - the behavior you’ve described here.

If the market were sane, I think VCs would be averse to investing in already-highly-invested-in companies that don’t have clear paths to profitability. But, well… our markets aren’t really sane or sensible in that way. Many VCs and managerial types would rather crack whips or institute OKRs/other MBA-type nonsense than simply make sure employees are both adequately salaried and adequately invested in the success of the company.

Yep, I think it's an open secret that many startups are known to be doomed from the beginning. That's one reason that founders tell such outrageous stories. Maybe it arises from the fact that tech changed and grew so fast that the non-technical asset class was unable to separate fact from fiction. You see that today with many of the AI startups that clearly have almost no meat on their bones but a really good pitch deck.

I mean does it surprise you at this point that it’s hard to find integrity in Silicon Valley? My current theory is that it’s a side effect of easy wins since the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no competition and only the US knew how to build software startups. It’s interesting where the next decades will go. I’m not saying the US will surely loose, but based on the products I see coming out of China, it’s going to be interesting. For example, in my local MediaMarkt, the most high-tech section is the drone section and these are all Chinese. Also, if you purely look at the specs, Chinese electric cars outperform all European and American brands (charging rate, battery capacity, and performance). Not only in the budget segment but in the performance segment as well.

“Boo hoo! Won’t anyone think of the poor investors?!”

Come on. You cannot be serious.

If you're in a major city, I suspect those chairs came out of a renegotiated/cancelled WeWork type building.

In my city, one of the WeWork copycats cancelled a brand new lease at short notice in May 2020. The building owner sold a lot of the furniture at the front door.

so funny I'm like wtf is an Aeron chair, I look it up I'm sitting on one now

No cell-cultivated leather office chairs.

There used to be some killer junk warehouses in San Jose filled with the detritus of electronics industry.

Triangle comes to mind.

Depends on what were they doing with it? If they were just flying with it from A to B then I tend to agree with you. If they were working on tech actually attached to the airplane (like a fly-by-wire system, sensors attached, or something like that) then I can imagine the point of it. Paperwork around test flights are hard enough without also having to convince the lessor to let you do what the FAA lets yo do.

That wasn’t a Cessna, but a Piper Warrior, and depending on the age it might not have been terribly much (even new ones can be had for $250k or so).