+1 on stratechery. I’m a subscriber and it’s well worth it. For 10 bucks a month you get access to real analysis of the tech sector. I can honestly say that I know 50x more about the industry now than I did when I subscribed.
Eh. That stratechery article isn’t very bullish.
Area middle-aged white man with no business experience expresses strongly held view about valuation of equity securities
Thinking out loud based on the WeWork discussion–what if the government provided free working space to startup companies? Would it result in “more innovation” or just a bunch of wasted space? Would be interesting to run numbers on future tax revenue and probabilities to see if it would ever pay off (obviously this would require corporations actually paying taxes).
Medicare for all would do way way more to cultivate small business startups than giving away office space. The amount of concern folks have about “losing healthcare” is maybe one of the biggest reasons people don’t take risky jobs at a new business or start their own business.
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Good point, seems obvious but I don’t see it mentioned often if at all.
It’s easier now than it used to be though what with Care by Obama.
But yeah, it’s stupid as fuck that a business owner has to concern himself with health insurance. The amount of time I spend dealing with it at our company is truly absurd. I’m getting ready to spend the next 3+ weeks soliciting bids for a new health plan because our cockeyed optimist boss is sure there’s a cheaper plan out there somewhere. And we’re already on a grandfathered pre-ACA plan that is perpetually strictly cheaper than anything newer currently available.
I dont think working space has ever been a huge pain point for startups, unless I’m really wrong. If you are small enough and without funding for this to even matter, you are likely able to easily work out of a coffee shop or remotely coordinate with a handful of people. Startups in this stage, like series A or even pre-series A, likely do not need a workspace super badly. Just my 2 cents though. FWIW I work in a small startup.
It was Yang’s entire M4A pitch. He’s right too. Not having health insurance is basically the only thing I sacrificed to become a business owner (for 2.5 years now no health insurance, although we’ve been fine just paying for stuff out of pocket) but sacrifice it I did. Now my wife is going to stop working with me (reducing our overall capacity not that we need it this year… which has something to do with why she’s doing this) to go back to nursing and get us some sweet sweet insurance.
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I’ve operated out of my home for years and years now. Getting an extra bedroom on your house/apartment isn’t that big of a burden.
Shop around, you might be better off getting your own exchange plan than getting on her work plan. They shank you on family coverage even on group plans. Even on our old school plan at work it’s cheaper for me to keep my kid on her own individual plan ($103/mo) and me on my work plan than it would be to cancel her plan and add her to mine which would run around $400
Yeah the Obamacare plans are hot garbage now. 600 a month for a 7k deductible with a 15k-20k out of pocket max, and you pay for everything until you hit the deductible. That’s for one 34 year old male.
That’s why we haven’t even had insurance. There literally hasn’t been an option that was worth purchasing since 2016.
Is any politician making the explicit argument that employment-based health care is one way for corporations to try and hold power over employees, using the potential for literal life-or-death situations to make them more desperate to do things they don’t want to do to keep their jobs?
I know you don’t want to hear this, but that was Andrew Yang’s entire pro M4A pitch. It’s how you sell it to conservatives. As being very significantly pro capitalist. Which it absolutely is.
Of course not. The Magical Benevolent Small Business Jerb-Creator remains sacrosanct regardless of party affiliation.
I’m envisioning more of a “corporations are evil and employment-based health care is one of the chains they use to enslave workers” argument, which is not something that I think would be appealing to conservatives.
I will admit to not reading Yang’s policy proposals, but if he is truly basing his support for m4a on reasons that look a lot like “this will look great for capitalism” then I really think he’s missing the point. Providing healthcare and a dignified life should be a moral imperative, not dependent on dollars and cents, and stooping to the level of fiscal arguments with what should be a moral argument concedes far too much ground to conservatives. That being said, I do agree with the points themselves, just wanted to get on a soapbox for a second.
Or you can say that it restricts people’s freedom to have their job and their medical care linked. And then he says something about his wife’s first question when he said he was running for president being ‘what are we going to do about our healthcare’. Then you talk about how new business formation is at an all time low…
It kind of handles itself from there, but you can see why conservatives eat that up with a spoon.
Given that I think the left needs to be more polarizing and that I’d rather stab a conservative with a fork than feed him with a spoon, you can see why I might be hostile to that argument.