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Comment by space_rock | Hacker News Reader

Your co-founder sounded overwhelmed with work. I don't understand what the author contributed to the company if he had no technical skill

Edit: I was mistaken. Author says responsibilities were balanced

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Assuming the author isn't exaggerating, he selected the co-founder based on this:

"He knew electronics, he knew firmware, he could design and write the firmware for a device that would collect the information."

Then, at the end:

"We went out to the lab at the back of HAX where the Knobgoblin explained he didn't really know electronics and didn't understand what needed to be done"

Regardless of any load from his day job, it sounds like the co-founder had none of the skills he was selected for. Which would explain the ThingWorx hail mary, the earlier "find some other existing board that sorta meets the requirements" event, and so on.

Let's say you meet someone at a bar whom you proceed to tell about your plans to build a spaceship, and the stranger says 'oh yeah, I know ships, I know space, we can definitely get a prototype spaceship done'. You believe him, with apparently doing zero due diligence. Months go by, and there is no spaceship. The stranger you met at the bar then confesses 'I don't actually know anything about building spaceships.'

Replace the location and area of expertise, and this is the same story that transpired here. Sure, the other party is a fraud, but the eponymous "chump" is not the other party, it is the first party.

Is this bar at an aerospace engineering conference? Come on. Anyway, the author admitted to naivety and I thought their list of things to check at the beginning reflected what they learned.

It's very easy to write a post trashing someone else. Very, very easy. Much of that trashing may or may not be deserved, we don't know because we only have one party's account of it. What we do know, however, is the behavior of one party - the author. And the whole posts reeks of a failure to take personal accountability, minor add-on sentences here and there notwithstanding.

I don’t think we’re obligated to come to a judgment. The article resonates with people because they’ve had similar experiences (e.g., elsewhere in the thread I mentioned I’ve been both kinds of cofounders.) It would be great if the other cofounder would share what happened to them and how they saw things, but in the meantime it’s fine for one person to tell their story. Most personal accounts are written by the person who experienced it and comments aren’t solicited from all involved parties as they would be in a journalistic article.

But most personal accounts are truthful. Unless it's a criminal conspiracies to defame the other personal most statements will be truthful. It might not be all the truth but this writing is still a witness to events

Author here. My background wasn't firmware or embedded systems, more databases, mobile and server software. I found building firmware extremely difficult, the rest of the system was well within my range of experience. The rest of the time I was solely responsible for organising field trials, getting customers, finding money, and still finding the time to build the software stack. This probably doesn't come through clearly in the post.

The author states that he wrote the android app, the firmware, the web prototype and then the rewrite of the web service - what about that suggests he has no technical skill?

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