Comment by leothekim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leothekim | Hacker News Reader

This epitomizes the arrogance and drowning self-absorbedness of Bay Area startups. And it does it in a Medium post.

And wow, there are some real gems in this post. For example:

"Customer interactions happen inside of their homes (anything that went wrong was grossly amplified)"

What did you expect? THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE SELLING.

"Client expectations vary wildly"

Yup, different people like different things. News at 11.

"High cleaner turn-over when product quality demands consistency"

What did you expect? Any warm body off the street can be trusted to go in some stranger's home?

"I could go on, but the point I am trying to make is that the Homejoy team was exceptionally talented and did amazing things given how punishing the industry was."

Oh I'm sorry. What you were trying to do was hard. That's because you were doing it wrong in the first place.

"To be fair legal constraints did throw a wrench into some of our plans."

For serious? To be fair? Fair to whom?

"Given what I’ve taken away from Homejoy I don’t look at it like a failure. I think there’s a morbid curiosity about what went wrong with a failed startup."

I don't give two shits about your failed startup. You failed for patently obvious reasons. You trivialized the problem which, for a company founded by so-called two engineers, is the ultimate sin of engineering.

"Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure."

Delusions of grandeur.

It's very common for the reasons for business failure to seem obvious in retrospect. That's because building a successful business requires getting a lot of independently trivial things right, and doing so under very tight time and resource constraints. If you're a commenter on Hacker News or a student in an MBA course, you have the time to focus on what went wrong, and of course it seems obvious. If you're an entrepreneur building the business, your attention was probably elsewhere, and it's likely that the you didn't even think about the things that killed your business.

> If you're an entrepreneur building the business, your attention was probably elsewhere, and it's likely that the you didn't even think about the things that killed your business.

Great point, and it also explains the "always a success rather than a failure in our minds" perspective. From their point of view, they just kept fixing one problem after another, which looks (and feels!) like progress.

Unfortunately, feeling good != doing good. It's unenviably difficult.

I agree with every single thing about your comment.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys go on to do other things, try again, fail again, try again, fail again, and eventually build something that actually works.

It might not be immediately obvious, but deluded entrepreneurs (with their blind optimism and relentless trial-and-error) make the world a better place. I don't know if we should encourage or discourage it, and I'm not too sure if these people can be discouraged either.

I suppose at best we can advocate for caution and due diligence.

I'd agree with your comment. But the "Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure" closing and this [1] make me believe that an important lesson wasn't learned.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10466888

IMO, your vitriolic armchair attack here is a hundred times more arrogant than anything I read in the Medium post. The author isn't on trial here, he's simply relating his thoughts on the issue. I for one, found it a worthwhile read.

Wow, this comment has a lot of anger towards someone just doing a post-mortem of the lessons they learned.

It illustrates something that I don't understand. Why do you care so much that you significantly affect the tone on this HN discussion? You bring up some excellent points, but your tone completely changes how your comment is perceived, and detracts from your contributions.

I am now going to take my own advice -- when you perceive someone else's words as so obnoxious that you cannot help but respond -- and ditch my HN account and re-add it to my blocklist.

Thank you for providing me with the impetus to regain hours of my day.

The only real failure here is that the author gave two years of his life (including holidays) working for the Cheungs. Hopefully he was in his early 20s, otherwise he has no excuse.

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