This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.

There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.

I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.

Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)

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weitendorf 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had the opposite reaction, this felt like a story that was literally purpose-built for pandering the hn audience without saying anything interesting.

Good fiction teaches you something you hadn't seen before, or challenges your perspective, or articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered. If it's just "some guy went to work and it sucked and he was right and everyone else was wrong and the Green People did classic Green People bullshit", and there's nothing else complicated or humanizing it, and no real-world lesson or stranger-than-fiction details to it, then what value does it have?

Like, what would happen if you asked a redditor with 10 years of experience reading about startups, but no real exposure to that culture/experience beyond the comment section, to write a story summarizing the consensus opinion on reddit of how startups typically work? Of course, because it's made up it's not wrong, but it exists entirely within the socially-contingent reality of the Internet Consensus.

In the real world there's politics, inter-personal relationships, personalities and personality flaws, and too much detail for "startup flails around" to be something you can reduce to "the startup flailed around". Of course it did, but why and how? A story that says "you know how it goes in all the other stories? yeah, that" or "there was a guy like you and he was good, and all the other guys were idiots and they were bad" has no point

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clan 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I grant you that it might pander to a certain audience.

You are 100% correct on good fiction.

I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.

Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.

Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.

But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.

I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.

Enough Internet for me today! ;-)

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HelloNurse 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One of the points is that, for a startup, not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely: these patterns of failure and "classic bullshit" are the universal norm. This piece "articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered": that you and your startup are no better than the characters in the tale, and equally doomed.

	▲	weitendorf 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, that's the Internet Consensus and the reddit comment section every time a startup doing anything is mentioned. You should never take a risk, business people are all evil and stupid, you should treat every employment or business opportunity as purely transactional because they'll do the same to you, there's nothing you can do about your job or employment, the only way to win is to cheat because everyone else is doing it, the key to happiness is educating other there's not really any cause and effect involved in the way things work unless you, personally, already know it. Just, you shouldn't do anything unless you understand everything about it, and if you don't it's not your fault. > not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely This is literally the defining trait of startups. What makes it stupid is that it's always more complicated than "engineer guy did everything he could but got screwed in the end" and that in real life, sometimes people do actually make money or establish businesses because of decisions they made, and conversely that there are real causes and effects behind things that don't go the way you want them to. Telling a story that doesn't contradict in anyway with consensus (so, directionally correct but always wrong) opinion has no point in the same way that there is no point telling a story where a knight rescues a princess by journeying through the kingdom making friends and overcoming challenges, then confronts the evil guy and kills him, the end. This is just that, but "the shady business guy and the screwed engineers"

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smugglerFlynn 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.

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6LLvveMx2koXfwn 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah because developers never wrote a line in POC which made it to prod ;)

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pockybum522 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.

	▲	restlake 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital

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alias_neo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.

- Mario

	▲	clan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. I find it important to laugh at the absurdities of life. I found this to be a home-run (albeit light-weight). It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.