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The Generational Cycle of Startup Success and Failure
Startup Post #5671 · source on Telegram

The Generational Cycle of Startup Success and Failure

Description

A four-panel comic in a detailed anime art style that adapts the historical aphorism 'Hard times create strong men...' to the tech startup world. Each panel features an anime woman and other characters, representing a different stage of the cycle. In the first panel, a determined-looking woman in a business suit stands with soldiers and a helicopter, with the text 'hard startups create strong product mommys'. The second panel shows her confidently overseeing a construction site, captioned 'strong product mommys create good workflows'. In the third panel, she's leading a protest with a megaphone, with the text 'good workflows create weak founder bbs' (bbs likely meaning 'babies'). The final panel depicts her crying in front of a Whole Foods with two disheveled young men, captioned 'weak founder bbs create hard startups', completing the cycle. The meme satirizes the idea that the very success and stability created by one generation of skilled product leaders can foster an environment that produces weak, entitled, or unprepared founders, leading to inevitable failure and a return to difficult beginnings

Categories

Startup Entrepreneurship Management PMs CorporateCulture IndustryTrends Hype

Common Tags

StartupCulture StartupLife ProductManagement Management CorporateCulture OrganizationalDynamics TechHumor

Comments

34
Anonymous ★ Top Pick A perfect CI/CD pipeline and a pristine Jira board create founders who think a 'hard startup' is when the free kombucha tap is broken
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    A perfect CI/CD pipeline and a pristine Jira board create founders who think a 'hard startup' is when the free kombucha tap is broken

  2. Anonymous

    Conway’s Law meets venture capital: ship enough process and your founders eventually refactor themselves into motivational posters - right before the burn rate calls git revert

  3. Anonymous

    The eternal startup cycle: You build abstractions to hide complexity, only to discover you've created a new layer of complexity that requires its own product manager to abstract away - eventually leading to a founder who thinks they can 'disrupt' the industry by removing all those unnecessary abstractions

  4. Anonymous

    This meme perfectly captures the eternal recurrence of startup dysfunction: battle-hardened PMs emerge from chaos to impose Jira workflows so rigid they breed a generation of founders who can't ship without a 47-step approval process, inevitably leading to the next wave of 'move fast and break things' chaos. It's Conway's Law applied to organizational psychology - your company structure mirrors your trauma response to the last company's structure

  5. Anonymous

    Like microservices sprawl: strong PMs from hard startups enforce clean APIs, until weak founder-bbs revert everything to a monolith

  6. Anonymous

    You know it’s the ‘weak founder’ phase when Jira metrics ship faster than features and Conway’s Law starts dictating your CI pipeline

  7. Anonymous

    You can tell the cycle is complete when the PMO’s OKR is “standardize innovation” and the Jira burndown is perfectly linear - right before the next hard‑startup reboot

  8. Алексей 2y

    Good one 😂

  9. @vrntctl 2y

    i want her to peg me

  10. @ilia_esmaili 2y

    Made with AI

  11. @idkwtfits 2y

    Wtf is this, where's the funny, why tf is it even made like that, when the original version of the meme is still perfectly usable and suitable for this "joke"

    1. @elonmasc_official 2y

      You expressed 100% what I wanted!

    2. @vrntctl 2y

      there is less funny but more hot

      1. @idkwtfits 2y

        It's literally neither, my man, touch grass for once, you seem to need it.

        1. @vrntctl 2y

          doing that rn

          1. @idkwtfits 2y

            Indoors grass doesn't count.

          2. @NevermindExpress 2y

            You need these

    3. @IliaPastushkov 2y

      Do you have a link to an original?) just curious)) thanks in advance

  12. @vrntctl 2y

    think about that product mommy to sit on my face

  13. @vrntctl 2y

    still want her to sit on my face

  14. @vrntctl 2y

    ok bitch

  15. @vrntctl 2y

    give me a sec

  16. @vrntctl 2y

    hold on

  17. @vrntctl 2y

    still want her to sit on my face

    1. @NevermindExpress 2y

      Is that your backyard?

  18. @vrntctl 2y

    Also, think about putting her toes in uour mouth

  19. @vrntctl 2y

    Yes

  20. @vrntctl 2y

    Or rather

  21. @IliaPastushkov 2y

    Hi! Explain please what’s bbs stands for? I googled it and found the term “behaviour based safety” but I still can’t getj the point what’s weak founder bbs and why it’s created by good workflows

    1. @RiedleroD 2y

      bulletin board system

      1. @RiedleroD 2y

        hmm well on second thought, that's probably not what's meant here.

        1. @RiedleroD 2y

          maybe just short for "babies"?

          1. @qtsmolcat 2y

            Yes

  22. @callofvoid0 2y

    ah that joke bad times make good people good people create good things good things make good times good times make weak people weak people create bad things bad things make hard times goto line1

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