11 ms·

I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want

I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want me to discuss, they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Its like founders are being taught a different language that they think provides value but makes no fucking sense.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I'd love to know where they learn that. In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did. So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.
- shripadk 7y ago
  I never thought of it this way. Really nice analogy.
- somecallitblues 7y ago
  Cryptic you were.
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  And if there’s a collision, just move to the next one!
- DenisM 7y ago
  I think it's pretty much spot-on. People try to summarize their thoughts, but if they are not good at it the summary ends up being "We're pretty cool, not like those other non-cool people, and we stand for good things". And then, having arrived at that thought, they express it using the words they have heard before in similar circumstances. And boom - pretentious mediocracy seasoned with hollow platitudes!
  - dchichkov 7y ago
    They might have arrived to this state of the page with meticulous A/B testing, optimizing for some function.
    - pillefitz 7y ago
      Maybe the initial guess was far off, so A/B testing led them to a pretty bad local optimum?
      - dchichkov 7y ago
        Who knows, could be a global optimum. Plausible theory could be - extreme frustration promotes memory formation ;) Or something ;)
- bob33212 7y ago
  "We find null and empty values in your tables and Excel files and prompt your users to fix them" sounds like a 10 dollar idea. How are you going to get employees and investors to really jump on board with that. "We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    This is how extreme waste is created in this industry.
  - WWLink 7y ago
    So you're saying that there's a lot of con artists out there? No surprise really lol.
colechristensen 7y ago
The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself. I'm going to start a business selling a quantum leap in synergy paradigms. Begin with the tagline, move on to a landing page, and after that's nicely done, get a group of people together to brainstorm what the company actually does.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  > The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself. Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.
- throwaheyy 7y ago
  I have a term for this phenomenon — the ‘Endo factor’. Credit to the geniuses at Theranos.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  A few weeks ago had a call from a saleswoman,after multiple failed attempts ( she called a few people in the company until finally someone transferred across) she managed to talk to me. I get a fair share of emails,calls and LinkedIn messages because of my title- everybody is trying to sell. So I thought 'screw this, let's see what she's got to say'. After her intro, and me asking a number of questions,I was still not sure what she was selling ( something in the cloud). Started with some storage solutions and ended with some security analytics. So it's not the CEOs of these companies, it's the sales reps as well. How can ever buy anything if I have no clue what it is.
pc86 7y ago
I'm curious how often you push back on that and say "no, 'full stack adaptive delivery' doesn't really mean anything. Tell. Me. What. You Do."
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  When I've done that, people get defensive - if you're doing cool shit, you'd say so. When you're doing something simple you say something that sounds grandiose and enterprisey - we're doing "Full stack adaptive delivery" because you're worried people will realise that "you upload media to us, and can use our system to convert it if you want, and then we serve it via Akamai" will make people think that about 2/3 of your offering is rather pointless, and you could probably get the last 1/3 direct from Akamai for cheaper. I feel bad shitting on a startup, but reading their docs I'm struggling to see what value they add beyond abstracting S3 and Akamai.
  - hvs 7y ago
    I'm not digging into their offering, but "making things easier" can be a great value proposition. They just need to be upfront about it.
    - EdwardDiego 7y ago
      It looks like you can allow admin or users to easily upload files to an S3 bucket that you don't have to manage, and then serve them via Akamai without configuring it. I guess there's a value add there if you don't have a person on board who can configure S3 and Akamai.
- ryguytilidie 7y ago
  As the person below said, a lot of these people have answers for pretty much everything. I'm the person you're responding to and it pretty much always goes like this: "Arent there other companies working on fraud on the blockchain? How are you different?" "Our team is amazing and is made up of myself and my founder who have 3-4 years of experience and need to fill it with 8+ year experienced engineers because before then no one is really useful here." Me: "..." OR "Do we really need another machine learning solution to classify documents? What is different from you and your competitors?" "Well, we think everyone else is doing it wrong and that we've found the perfect solution." "What is that?" "Myself and my cofounder are far smarter than any of our competitors". OR "How do you talk to candidates about salary?" "Well, we don't give any actual numbers, but we share our compensation philosophy doc, which ive linked here". "Right, but can you afford these people? why do you expect them to take a huge pay cut to make you a millionaire?" "The right person will have faith" There's always an answer that feels like it was fed to them by a VC who knows it won't really work, but is just hoping and praying.
megablast 7y ago
> they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Because you are asking a meaningless question. Firstly, they are no experts on their competitors. Secondly, how can anyone even be, unless they have used all of them for a long time? Who can do that comparison??
- ryguytilidie 7y ago
  You're mocking the idea that the founder of a company would understand their market...?
cosmodisk 7y ago
LinkedIn is full of this shit. Depending on what people one follows or has in contacts, it's just too esy to forget there's anything else but 'thought leaders', 'thinkers in cheaf', 'harmony executors', 'power multiplier' and so on. Our office is next to a managed kitchen,one of those that cook food for restaurants on Deliveroo or Uber Eats. It's a kitchen. If you'd look at the owner's LinkedIn profile, you could probably say he's the next Elon Musk. You have a few managed kitchens, that's it.You are not a visionary,come on,man. Eventually others start copying.
sopooneo 7y ago
I am with you on this. When I look up new companies and can't get a basic idea of their product/service even after spending minutes on their home page, it drives me batty. But I also have a lesson from my former decades on earth: if lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, there is probably something you don't know. So could it be that there is some reason all these startups are so maddeningly obtuse? Other than just being bad at communication, I mean? Is there some incentive to not actually say what you do?
- baddox 7y ago
  For many companies, the home page is probably simply not used for selling their product or informing new people about the company, and instead serves more as a symbol of the company's aesthetic and a way to welcome and comfort visitors. Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just supposed to look nice and welcoming. This makes sense to me. You generally don't see uninformative homepages from consumer software-as-a-service or direct-to-consumer companies, for instance. Airbnb and Airtable both seem to immediately explain in fairly clear terms what they do, for example. Even massive software companies with a huge range of products that self-serve to business customers have pretty explanatory homepages. Salesforce is a decent example. I think the home pages that get these sorts of complaints are either companies that don't have product-market fit (and thus don't even know what they are yet), or companies that have long involved sales processes with large enterprise clients where they probably tend to negotiate highly-customized services. An example of the latter that comes to mind is Splunk, whose website uses a lot of buzz words and seems to basically be saying "trust us, if you're a big company with a lot of data, we can do anything you need regarding your data."
  - ChrisInEdmonton 7y ago
    I disagree on Airtable. Their homepage currently says "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way." I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what? I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question. Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.
jccooper 7y ago
It may work in in impressing people while speaking, where you have more attention and can elaborate on what you actually do later, and maybe people get trained to do this during the fundraising process, but in the online sales cycle... "That's nice. Ctrl-W."
mraudiobook_com 7y ago
I am building an illegal audiobook sharing site. Can you recruit me?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I'd love to know where they learn that. In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did. So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.

shripadk 7y ago
I never thought of it this way. Really nice analogy.
somecallitblues 7y ago
Cryptic you were.
travisjungroth 7y ago
And if there’s a collision, just move to the next one!
DenisM 7y ago
I think it's pretty much spot-on. People try to summarize their thoughts, but if they are not good at it the summary ends up being "We're pretty cool, not like those other non-cool people, and we stand for good things". And then, having arrived at that thought, they express it using the words they have heard before in similar circumstances. And boom - pretentious mediocracy seasoned with hollow platitudes!
- dchichkov 7y ago
  They might have arrived to this state of the page with meticulous A/B testing, optimizing for some function.
  - pillefitz 7y ago
    Maybe the initial guess was far off, so A/B testing led them to a pretty bad local optimum?
    - dchichkov 7y ago
      Who knows, could be a global optimum. Plausible theory could be - extreme frustration promotes memory formation ;) Or something ;)
bob33212 7y ago
"We find null and empty values in your tables and Excel files and prompt your users to fix them" sounds like a 10 dollar idea. How are you going to get employees and investors to really jump on board with that. "We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  This is how extreme waste is created in this industry.
- WWLink 7y ago
  So you're saying that there's a lot of con artists out there? No surprise really lol.

colechristensen 7y ago

The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself. I'm going to start a business selling a quantum leap in synergy paradigms. Begin with the tagline, move on to a landing page, and after that's nicely done, get a group of people together to brainstorm what the company actually does.

antisthenes 7y ago
> The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself. Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.
throwaheyy 7y ago
I have a term for this phenomenon — the ‘Endo factor’. Credit to the geniuses at Theranos.
cosmodisk 7y ago
A few weeks ago had a call from a saleswoman,after multiple failed attempts ( she called a few people in the company until finally someone transferred across) she managed to talk to me. I get a fair share of emails,calls and LinkedIn messages because of my title- everybody is trying to sell. So I thought 'screw this, let's see what she's got to say'. After her intro, and me asking a number of questions,I was still not sure what she was selling ( something in the cloud). Started with some storage solutions and ended with some security analytics. So it's not the CEOs of these companies, it's the sales reps as well. How can ever buy anything if I have no clue what it is.

pc86 7y ago

I'm curious how often you push back on that and say "no, 'full stack adaptive delivery' doesn't really mean anything. Tell. Me. What. You Do."

EdwardDiego 7y ago
When I've done that, people get defensive - if you're doing cool shit, you'd say so. When you're doing something simple you say something that sounds grandiose and enterprisey - we're doing "Full stack adaptive delivery" because you're worried people will realise that "you upload media to us, and can use our system to convert it if you want, and then we serve it via Akamai" will make people think that about 2/3 of your offering is rather pointless, and you could probably get the last 1/3 direct from Akamai for cheaper. I feel bad shitting on a startup, but reading their docs I'm struggling to see what value they add beyond abstracting S3 and Akamai.
- hvs 7y ago
  I'm not digging into their offering, but "making things easier" can be a great value proposition. They just need to be upfront about it.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    It looks like you can allow admin or users to easily upload files to an S3 bucket that you don't have to manage, and then serve them via Akamai without configuring it. I guess there's a value add there if you don't have a person on board who can configure S3 and Akamai.
ryguytilidie 7y ago
As the person below said, a lot of these people have answers for pretty much everything. I'm the person you're responding to and it pretty much always goes like this: "Arent there other companies working on fraud on the blockchain? How are you different?" "Our team is amazing and is made up of myself and my founder who have 3-4 years of experience and need to fill it with 8+ year experienced engineers because before then no one is really useful here." Me: "..." OR "Do we really need another machine learning solution to classify documents? What is different from you and your competitors?" "Well, we think everyone else is doing it wrong and that we've found the perfect solution." "What is that?" "Myself and my cofounder are far smarter than any of our competitors". OR "How do you talk to candidates about salary?" "Well, we don't give any actual numbers, but we share our compensation philosophy doc, which ive linked here". "Right, but can you afford these people? why do you expect them to take a huge pay cut to make you a millionaire?" "The right person will have faith" There's always an answer that feels like it was fed to them by a VC who knows it won't really work, but is just hoping and praying.

megablast 7y ago

> they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Because you are asking a meaningless question. Firstly, they are no experts on their competitors. Secondly, how can anyone even be, unless they have used all of them for a long time? Who can do that comparison??

ryguytilidie 7y ago
You're mocking the idea that the founder of a company would understand their market...?

cosmodisk 7y ago

LinkedIn is full of this shit. Depending on what people one follows or has in contacts, it's just too esy to forget there's anything else but 'thought leaders', 'thinkers in cheaf', 'harmony executors', 'power multiplier' and so on. Our office is next to a managed kitchen,one of those that cook food for restaurants on Deliveroo or Uber Eats. It's a kitchen. If you'd look at the owner's LinkedIn profile, you could probably say he's the next Elon Musk. You have a few managed kitchens, that's it.You are not a visionary,come on,man. Eventually others start copying.

sopooneo 7y ago

I am with you on this. When I look up new companies and can't get a basic idea of their product/service even after spending minutes on their home page, it drives me batty. But I also have a lesson from my former decades on earth: if lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, there is probably something you don't know. So could it be that there is some reason all these startups are so maddeningly obtuse? Other than just being bad at communication, I mean? Is there some incentive to not actually say what you do?

baddox 7y ago
For many companies, the home page is probably simply not used for selling their product or informing new people about the company, and instead serves more as a symbol of the company's aesthetic and a way to welcome and comfort visitors. Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just supposed to look nice and welcoming. This makes sense to me. You generally don't see uninformative homepages from consumer software-as-a-service or direct-to-consumer companies, for instance. Airbnb and Airtable both seem to immediately explain in fairly clear terms what they do, for example. Even massive software companies with a huge range of products that self-serve to business customers have pretty explanatory homepages. Salesforce is a decent example. I think the home pages that get these sorts of complaints are either companies that don't have product-market fit (and thus don't even know what they are yet), or companies that have long involved sales processes with large enterprise clients where they probably tend to negotiate highly-customized services. An example of the latter that comes to mind is Splunk, whose website uses a lot of buzz words and seems to basically be saying "trust us, if you're a big company with a lot of data, we can do anything you need regarding your data."
- ChrisInEdmonton 7y ago
  I disagree on Airtable. Their homepage currently says "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way." I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what? I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question. Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.

jccooper 7y ago

It may work in in impressing people while speaking, where you have more attention and can elaborate on what you actually do later, and maybe people get trained to do this during the fundraising process, but in the online sales cycle... "That's nice. Ctrl-W."

mraudiobook_com 7y ago

I am building an illegal audiobook sharing site. Can you recruit me?