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Comment by kinai | Hacker News Reader

"We had raised a total of $2.8M (2 rounds)" "we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue"

That is how startups in America work: a) take any idea b) find enough believers c) throw money at the problem until it either works out or fails.

I mean are those people for real? It's like watching 5y olds playing monopoly

How about: If you need millions investment for your idea then your idea is just BAD (except you are building Teslas maybe)

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We're going to add the Principle of Charity (http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html) to the HN guidelines as a way of emphasizing how badly comments like this break them.

If you assume that other people are stupid, nothing is easier than to conclude that they're stupid as well. This is good for attracting upvotes from others who feel the same way you do in the first place. But it's deeply bad for thoughtful discussion.

1. You've been saying that for a long time. Do it! Is this a trickier task than I think it is? Can I do it for you?

2. Consider adding AGF at the same time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

Not all of WP's idioms are valuable, but there aren't many community management problems they haven't engaged with (and none of the ones they've missed apply to HN) and this is one of their better results.

Post-Dang HN has been pretty great. Thanks! Level it up again. :)

They didn't throw "millions" at the idea. If you read the article carefully, they stopped after spending $1M, i.e., with 2/3 of their investors' money still in the bank. Yes, maybe they could've stopped/pivoted sooner, but once you are experimenting with something, you need to be patient enough to give it a shot. And it looks like the investors opted for sticking with the team for their next shot as opposed to taking that money back - an option that was on the table. That's an indicator of trust, so maybe the team isn't that clueless after all.

I don't necessarily agree. Some businesses simply can't be started without a ton of cash (like building cars like you mentioned). I don't think you could bootstrap a new supermarket concept. Sometimes you just have to get investors to try out an idea.

Yea but they were not building Teslas, they were doing some app/site for restaurants... I wonder what they spend 100k a month on.

Startups often evolve as a clearing of multiple hurdles of "optimism" in succession before they fail.

Servers are cheap. Engineers and sales people are not.

Agreed. I don't look at this and think "mediocre success", as they described it. I see failure.

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