> Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out

Yeah. I was an engineer in a startup for a good bit and after a certain point I realized that for us there wasn't any point in actually trying to make working products - a flashy render did so much more than anything working ever would, at least until tens of millions of funding had been raised. Many of the other startups pitching at the same events as us were using off-the-shelf software and saying it was theirs, if they had any demo at all instead of concept renders.

And at that point, having little experience in creating renders, I contented myself with going to conferences, following around my much more charismatic cofounder, and saying tech buzzwords to make the business types smile. They sure love their AI. More than one conference we went to had an itinerary of talks where literally every talk title had "AI" in the name.

I don't think it was a waste. I learned people skills, I can talk to a crowd, pitch ideas confidently to men in suits full of the right words if I have to, and I do think on some level it is actually the right call to not build. Whatever I would have hacked together with me and whoever else was around would not have been the basis for a good product and probably would have calcified bad decisions anyways - better to raise capital before building.

Oh it definitely wasn't a waste for me either. I've gone from an introvert stumbling over trying to explain technical concepts to being able to pitch abstract ideas that check all the right boxes for VCs and whatnot.

Opened a ton of doors after the hackathon. Would've never dreamed of coming over here to SF and being part of the whole startup/VC ecosystem.