The Random Startup Generator Is Terrifying
You know how everyone has at least one friend (or distant Linkedin connection) who runs a startup that’s “Like Tinder but for X” or some variation? Turns out this trend is a pretty ominous sign for the economy. Peter S. Cohan, a rich guy who gives advice to other rich guys, thinks the startup bubble is getting ready to burst.
Cohan isn’t doomsaying for no reason, either. According to The National Venture Capital Association, the market for initial public offerings last year was the best since 2000 — the year of the dotcom collapse. Last quarter alone, 27 venture-backed IPOs raised $4.4 billion — the seventh consecutive quarter with 20 or more venture-backed IPOs — a tally not seen since the ominous fourth quarter of the year 2000. Basically, this girth of multi-billion dollar companies popping up means a lot of multi-billion dollar companies will start going under pretty soon. If you’re someone between the ages of 18 and 30, you probably work at one of these companies. According to Forbes, 47% of Millennials (seriously, fuck that word) work for start ups, and we’re twice as likely to start one of these ill-fated companies than our seemingly less stupid — older — counterparts.
The economics around booms and busts gets sort of murky when you dig into the numbers, but the tech industry offers a pretty intuitive understanding of what is going on right now. If you work at a startup, go to your company’s website. Chances are it looks and sounds something like the ones generated programmatically by the duo of Georgia Tech computer science students Mike Bradley and Tiffany Zhang, who created the Random Startup Generator. The pair’s creation illustrates the coming industry calamity by mimicking billions of dollars worth of investment in a Javascript/Bootstrap module cycling through a bunch of random buzzwords.
The website allows users to click through a seemingly infinite amount of randomly generated startups that share the characteristics of the guys who pay your rent every month. If a bit of code can churn out companies with billion dollar valuations, that probably means there’s bad news ahead for any of the thousands of startup employees out there.
As Bradley explains on his personal site, the generator “serves as a parody of startups that have websites full of vague praise and little information about their actual business, often because they have little to show in that regard.” Great. We all work for a bunch of pretend companies.
Check out some of the best fake startups below and play around with the generator yourself HERE.
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