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I should add that the valley doesn’t have much of an appetite for bullshitters either, despite what the media would have you believe. Mistakes happen, because t
by borski 8y ago
I should add that the valley doesn’t have much of an appetite for bullshitters either, despite what the media would have you believe. Mistakes happen, because there’s a lot more money here, but by and large bullshitters do not get helped or funded.
- longtoadenergy 8y agoIn my experience, the only bullshitters who are successful have knowledge in key domains anyways. Running a company is hard, and you have engineers who think it's just math. Clinkle is a perfect example of this.
- cbnotfromthere 8y agoElon Musk is the best counterargument to your claim.
- repolfx 8y agoI think that would depend a lot on how you define "bullshitters". Outright knowing scams? I'd agree with you. Startups with no plausible business model, a bunch of buzzwords and hopes and dreams and no clear elucidation of why anyone would become their customer? Seemingly endless fields of those in the valley.
- sumedh 8y ago> but by and large bullshitters do not get helped or funded Theranos
- sbarre 8y ago> Mistakes happen
- eropple 8y agoYC's latest batch has a "drop-in replacement" for WordPress that is actually a rewrite-your-app headless CMS with little differentiation from every other headless CMS and a "don't worry, you don't need to know how to code to automate crypto trading, we definitely aren't watching for which models work!" Bullshit abounds. And YC is supposed to be the smart-and-decent money. TBH, one of the really nice things about living around here is that if I take a meeting with a funded company they almost certainly hit at least some bar of seriousness. All successful companies? Definitely not, but there is a lot less chaff for me to filter through.
- woah 8y agoWait... you’re saying that someone’s a scammer just because they are working on a CMS?
- solarmist 8y agoAs a business? Yeah, probably. Who’s gonna pay for that when there’s good free ones.
- borski 8y agoWhy would anyone pay for Dropbox when they could just use rsync? It’s free!
- eropple 8y agoNo. I'm saying they're bullshitters (and ones with dishonest marketing, to boot--go look at the CosmicJS Show HN and tell me that it doesn't make the part of you that cares about honesty start itching). You don't have to be running a scam to be a bullshitter. But you do have to have an undeserved and unwarranted sort of presentation, and you likely don't have much cattle to go with that hat.
- borski 8y agoYou seem to be equating “high risk” with bullshit. That’s not the case - the appetite for risk is higher here, that’s true. But it’s not like companies can just stand up and have money thrown at them; due diligence is real, though mistakes do happen.
- scottlocklin 8y agoTheranos, Juicero, Ubeam, Y combinator flying motorbike, Airware, Jawbone, pretty much any "AI" or even machine learning company that isn't overtly a consulting firm, pretty much any autonomous vehicle startup that isn't a mapping company.... Most of the companies which have "succeeded" in the post-2008 landscape have been pretty feeble; it's not like Uber or AirBnB are tech companies. They're phone apps that enable people to defy taxi and hotel laws. FWIIW I've known Byrne for years, and was shocked when he moved to the Bay Area.
- borski 8y agoLike I said, mistakes happen. Investors in the valley are willing to take larger risks, and by virtue of there being more money, there will be more mistakes. There are mistakes in Boston too. I don’t know the statistics, but I would bet it’s proportional, though perhaps not because the risk appetite is lower.
- borski 8y agoTwilio, Stripe, Pure Storage, Nutanix, Slack, Dropbox, Box, SpaceX... Some of these companies could never have started in Boston, because finding capital would have been impossible. It isn’t always technological advantage that wins, but UX or biz model, or any number of other things related to execution.