The Startup That Helps Startups Start Up
Description
This is a single-panel cartoon, drawn in the classic black-and-white, ink-on-paper style reminiscent of The New Yorker. The scene is set in a bar, where a man holding a beer bottle is talking to a woman. Other patrons are visible in the background. Below the drawing, a caption reads: 'I'm starting a startup that helps other startups start up.' The artist's signature, 'Hafeez,' is visible in the bottom right corner of the panel. The humor is dry and satirical, targeting the insular and often circular nature of the tech startup ecosystem. It mocks the trend of creating B2B companies whose sole purpose is to serve other startups, rather than addressing a fundamental consumer or market need. For experienced tech professionals, this is a deeply relatable and cynical observation on the venture capital-fueled 'bubble,' where the business model can feel like selling shovels to other gold miners in an already saturated field
Comments
15Comment deleted
Their platform is called Recursion-as-a-Service. The base case is when the VC funding runs out
Their cap-table is already a cyclic linked list that points back to itself - good luck dereferencing that at Series A
Ah yes, the classic Y Combinator combinator - a higher-order function that takes startups as input and returns a function that produces more startups. Stack overflow guaranteed when you realize your cap table is just pointers to other cap tables
It's a clean architecture: infinitely recursive value creation with no base case - VCs call that a 'platform play', engineers call it a stack overflow
Ah yes, the classic O(n²) business model - where your customer acquisition cost scales quadratically with ecosystem complexity. It's like building a compiler for a language that only compiles compilers, or launching a Kubernetes operator that manages other operators. Eventually you realize you've created a dependency graph so circular that even your cap table needs garbage collection. But hey, at least your pitch deck writes itself: 'We're the infrastructure layer for the infrastructure layer.' VCs love recursion until they hit the stack overflow
Infinite recursion in the startup stack - until the seed funding blows the call stack
We’re PaaS - Pivot‑as‑a‑Service - our business model is a circular dependency; CAC equals our carry on their seed round
So it’s a higher‑order startup - like a Y‑combinator - returning startups until runway hits zero and throws OutOfFundingException
But there is no startup that will help your startup startup... Comment deleted
When will this startup start to help me make a startup that helps other startup start up Comment deleted
The startup that will help you to make startup that helps other startup start up will startup soon Comment deleted
startup/100 Comment deleted
startup / 0 = infinite startup Comment deleted
I am afraid of this Comment deleted
unavailable Comment deleted