Edited my comment when I saw this. This is exceedingly dangerous. Ask any rower that's worked with people on C2 machines. Everyone will instinctively throw the damper to setting 10, then throw their back due to bad posture.
I don't have any stake in C2, I just want to make clear that they are the standard that this will be measured against and that they are said standard for a reason. Anything advertised lesser should be viewed with suspicion, particularly for safety critical products.
All that said, there are opportunities to improve, but those opportunities mainly exist in the software space. Focusing on hardware solely to create a moat isn't innovation, it's making landfill fodder.
Finally, I have significant experience in this area, both as an athlete and a coach. Enough that I would unmask myself very quickly if I mentioned any details. I don't coach anymore and don't have any financial interest in that either. Teaching people to use these devices safely isn't an "instructional videos" and "warm up" ordeal. This will sound silly but people generally don't know what their body is doing without tight feedback loops and their perception breaks down under stress/over the duration of a workout. We frequently had people row in front of mirrors to get things to click (another business opportunity in the computer vision space). It's painfully obvious when you go anywhere that has mixed classically trained and self trained rowers who is who.
I only raise questions because the move-fast-break-things approach is dangerous when you're breaking people. I couldn't care less about the VCs getting fleeced by this.
That breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to (1) assume good faith, and (2) not to post insinuations of astroturfing or shilling but rather to email hn@ycombinator.com if you're worried about abuse. You can easily make your substantive points while sticking to these rules.
Most new users are legit and it's the wrong cultural tradeoff for this place to allow established users to harass them. I certainly appreciate your wish to protect the integrity of the threads but it needs to be done while remaining an open, welcoming community. That last thing we want is to incentivize legit new users to leave just as soon as they arrive here, and we put up with a lot of downside in order not to punish the innocent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it's also pretty nasty to say that VCs are "getting fleeced by this" in a launch thread where you're personally interacting with the founder. It's clear that you're an expert on rowing—that's fabulous! It's fine that you have a safety critique to make about this product—you've repeated it half a dozen times now. But it's not in keeping with the spirit of this site to accuse someone of outright corruption.
If you had strong evidence of ill intent or something, it would maybe be different, but all you've got is a difference of opinion. Your opinion is an informed one, but not the only one, and please let's not do the internet slide-down where differences of opinion turn into accusations of malfeasance. That leads to the hell we're trying to avoid on this site. Users who are posting here owe the community better than that, no matter how well informed they are.
The people who do that normally only row for a few minutes at a time, and aren't really at any significant risk of injury. The only class of people who seem to consistently develop back problems from rowing machines are people who train on them for hours a day in high school and never lift weights.
All the other back injuries in rowing are usually from either sweep rowing or from lifting.
I know of no one who has injured themselves rowing (on a machine or outside).
I'm not saying these things are death machines or anything, but the concept of adding essentially seated row to a rowing machine is fairly dangerous. Throwing an air damper up to 10 and ripping on it for a couple minutes will leave you quite sore the next morning but adding high weight can start pulling muscles or slipping discs.
E.g. almost all high-level swimmers have shoulder problems, but no one who just goes for a swim a few times a week is going to injure their shoulders. Almost all baseball players have ankle problems, but no one who plays baseball with friends after work is at risk of this.
The reason rowers get back problems is basically a combination of overuse, the asymmetric load-bearing motion of sweep, and underdeveloped antagonistic muscles. Given the device and the target market, none of these issues are really at play here.
In contrast or my cycling friends (which I took up after) have back problems, in particular the ones who started when young.
Mind you this was more than 20 years ago so maybe the training regime has changed.
There are two major rowing postures you'll find people tend to use, hips rotated forward and hips back (spine slightly arched forward/convex). Neither is really wrong but for high resistance you need to be in the hips forward position (back slightly concave) as is the technique for weight lifting in the seated row. IME most people don't actually comprehend which position they're in but using the wrong one can be catastrophic. You typically have to spend a few hours with someone ensuring they stay in the correct orientation before they really get it.