December 18, 2024 · 2 minutes read

The boring business

2010 up to 2020 is the golden age of the tech company. Jobs opportunity can be found everywhere. Companies competes each other to hire best talents. Investor invests to many start-ups. Working at start up company was the dream job. They paid the employees with good compensation.

Then, Covid hit the world. The remote working become new trend. Some companies survived. Some of it even grew at an amazing rate. And some the others were collapsed. The tech winter started.

The covid era ended. There was a hope that the tech winter would pass. The tech would regain it’s golden time again. But, although the covid era ended, the tech winter kept going. Less job vacancy, especially for junior devs. Layoff everywhere. Up until now.

I’m sick to hear that almost whenever I open social media.

I don’t know if the hypergrowth and valuation-oriented of the start-up companies is the root cause of all of this. When it comes to business, I rather work for a company which have a clear and stable business model. I value those two more. At the end of the day, business is all about making profit.

I had a bad experience when company depends on the investors’ funding. Once it fails to get the funding, it’s over. Many of the startups in Indonesia were like this.

So, if I were to have a business, I want to have kind of business I mentioned earlier. Usually, that means the boring one. A business that is not a seasonal business. A business that doesn’t depend on the trend of the technology. So that when the trend of the technology changes, my business won’t be disrupted.

It’s kinda cool to have a business like that. When I visited my parents last weekend, we passed a legendary bakery store in town. Guess when it was established? 2010? Nope. 2000? Wrong answer. 1950? Another wrong answer.

It was established at 1920! It’s over 1 century! And it’s still doing good until now, without depending on the investor’s funding.

Well, they might depend on the loan from the bank at some point. I don’t know. But if so, still, it’s different from being funded by investors. We don’t have to hire many people to hack the growth. As long as you can pay the installment, then we’re on our own pace. Hire and expand as needed.

Now, the trend of AI is rising. Many companies started to adopt it. I wonder, when the AI trend is over, will the bizzard of layoffs come again?