Demand and supply is playing a big role in the valuations.

One could argue that absent a MnA ecosystem, investors only have a handful of opportunities to multiply their investment. It leads to simple handing-off to next round investors as the one and perhaps only opportunity to get returns on the funds.

Only recently has the ecosystem understood the potential for IPO in India as a potential for exit.

That's true, but I wonder why these late-stage investors are investing at these valuations with complete disregard for capital efficiency.

My guess is, late stage investors are bringing money from a different class of LPs, who aren’t looking for asset classes that grow 20x.

Leave 20X. My concern is that some of these can't even retain their valuations (Oyo and Byju are valued below their total funding amounts already).

You are right and I am simply putting myself in the shoes of the late stage investors. Perhaps they have been sold a story the drives confidence in a 2X return. When the story doesn’t hold up, there isn’t much of a multiples buffer to prevent losing money.

> it's literally just an http client with a UI, better luck next time

This is the exact toxic dismissive attitude that leads to OSS software going the payment-gated route.

isn't that the point of OSS software? vendor makes a bunch of user-hostile changes, people get pissed and fork it.

if they wanted to be hostile towards users, then OSS was a mistake

The reason we end up with user hostile changes, is because the dev user community is cannibalistically stingy. This cycle will continue forever, until people stop dismissing others work as “curl with a UI” or “curl with FTP” and refusing to pay for anything.

Yeah, never understood the charm of it either. My favorite is Bruno (https://github.com/usebruno/bruno), one can even commit its text-based files to version control. Insomnia is probably better but had a major fiasco last year - https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577

Bruno didn’t exist until ~2yrs ago and was created as a reactionary alternative to Postman’s changes. What did you use before that?

I used curl before that. But I can see how curl will be intimidating for non-engineers.

Now, I recommend Bruno to even non-engineers.

Notwithstanding your judgment of others’ ability to use curl - I wouldn’t compare API clients to curl at all.

Clients like Postman/Bruno provide private/shared request libraries, detailed customization of the request/response, automated load and behavior testing, syntax highlighting and formatting, pretty printing and so much more.

> Clients like Postman/Bruno provide private/shared request libraries, detailed customization of the request/response, automated load and behavior testing, syntax highlighting and formatting, pretty printing and so much more.

For all engineers

  - detailed customization of the request/response - Python scripts
  - syntax highlighting - bat
  - pretty printing - jq
  - automated load and behavior testing - several specialized tools

This feels like a worse version of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The comparison to Dropbox is incorrect. But rather than trying to explain that, I will wait a few years and let the market decide whether my concerns are legitimate.

well played I guess

but a side question, how did you find that comment? is there a listing of historic hn comments somewhere?

What you linked to seems to be in archive and read-only mode already.