Please don't ask founders existential questions | Hacker News Reader

Please don't ask founders existential questions

david.ae

62 pointsarunsivadasan87 comments

Could not disagree more. If your plan is to build a search engine and you _can't_ answer such a basic question as "why would someone use your engine over Google," then your plan is going to fail.

If you're a founder you should anticipate these kinds of questions and have answers for them that make sense; if you ask these kinds of questions you should expect an actual answer, even if you don't agree with it.

Edit, to hopefully avoid some predictable replies:

- If the point is "don't be a jerk" then fine, there's a way to ask these basic questions without being discouraging.

- The author is right if the project isn't supposed to be a business. "Why would someone use your hobby language instead of C++" is a stupid question because the point of writing a hobby language is the fun of writing it.

But if someone is putting their life savings into a business idea and can't answer the most basic questions about it... Maybe they need a little discouragement.

Edit, again:

Also, I'm not a founder, but I have a side project, and I've gotten these sorts of questions about it... and I love them! Because it's a starting point into talking about my side project, which I love doing with people! I'm not discouraged by someone questioning why I'm building my thing, because I know perfectly well why I'm building my thing and I enjoy sharing that with people.

The OP is 'begging the question', by not explicitly stating the purpose of such conversations, and the fundamental reasons for avoiding these questions. Here is the critical paragraph:

>"It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of. Your attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone. If anything, you’re totally denying the fundamental aspect of innovation and entrepreneurs throughout history who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new."

Notice how the author says: "[y]our attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone". They also say imply that non-technical conversations about start-ups are basically useless: "[t]here is already enough knowledge about startups".

> who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new.

I wonder how many of those teams couldn't answer what was better about their product than the one they were replacing? I'll bet Google themselves could have answered that question, comparing themselves to Yahoo, back in the day.

I think the key part is less that and more the way of phrasing it. So you're encouraged to ask non-technical questions how they're supposed to be better than the competition but not allowed to say "but Google dominates that space, doesn't it?" to imply they don't necessarily need to exist. (though the author also says "I think your UI is not good" is 'constructive' feedback, so they don't think you have to be nice!)

I think there's a point to that especially if it's a business you don't know and you're not a VC or angel, but I also think there's a surprisingly large number of entrepreneurs out there who are smart enough to live off ramen and program something complex like a search engine who do have a massive blind spot about routes to market or the complexity required for the software to actually be viable rather than just minimum. Sometimes the blunt approach "doesn't the network effect of $dominantplayer create a massive lockin" is more helpful than a general "so how are you going to get customers?" which is easy to answer with a generic "sales/marketing/referrals/affiliates". The entrepreneur ought to be able to give a more interesting answer to the first question, and if they aren't able to they're going to need to figure it out...

I had just that conversation with one of the founders of Cuil. Anyone remember Cuil? Search engine company, 2008-2010. They actually got it running, but not very well. I asked what the revenue model was. They didn't have a good answer. They ran out of runway before finding more investors or revenue.

Cuil was a nice demo, though. With under 100 people, they got a search engine going that did its own crawls and was roughly comparable to early Google. But this was before Google started to really suck, and there wasn't a market.

Google hired their key people to keep them off the market.

> You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

I was very confused by this response, but searching Google for this text returns the following page on "Cuil Theory"

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory

Never having come across it before, I thank you. That made my day. Or didn't. Or something. All I know is I am not having a hamburger for lunch.

Holy shit. I had completely forgotten about that until just now. Reading your comment, I was struck by the most intense déjà vu. Took me a few seconds to place it.

3‽, might as well start looking up those old rage comics.

Is your point here that cuil should not have been started because they failed to answer your question about revenue model?

Well, lack of a revenue model killed them.

There was more pressure back then to build a profitable business. Today there are companies growing by funding round after funding round without reaching profitability.

I think the point is

"If you cannot espouse the benefits and possible market of the product you yourself are building - why are you building it?"

Basically - be your own advocate. If you can't handle someone asking about your product (even in a negative fashion) how the hell can you hope to have the conviction and drive to actually sell it?

You don't need to "convince" every critic - but you sure as hell need to be able to step into the ring and talk to their points.

This is the same reason debate teams often explicitly spend time reviewing the problem from their opponents perspective - you must be able to understand and counter arguments from your detractors.

This article makes me very curious about what the author considers an existential question. I don't disagree with the content of the article, but the title is throwing me. None of the examples he gave of unproductive things to say are questions at all, and I would consider one of his recommended questions (What is the competition missing that you think you got?) to be pretty close to an existential question for a startup.

I took it to mean any question that, if you don't have a good answer, means your startup shouldn't exist. Like if the answer to "why would someone use you instead of Google" is null, then you are probably not going to successfully compete with Google. Or, you could come up with the best tool that ever existed for converting WEBP images to PCX, and if you don't have an answer for "who on earth has used the PCX format in the past thirty years" then you're probably not gonna sell many copies of that tool.

But the article's author would probably regard "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".

It's not the same as the author's example "what makes you believe you can do better than Google" because that question assumes you are doing exactly the same thing as Google: that all the prospective users of the idea are fully satisfied with Google, and have to be convinced to use something else for no reason at all. Your "why would someone use your search engine over Google" is better; it's more closely in line with "how will you get your first users".

> "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".

Well, one of these is a question, the other is a statement... Actually I noticed that if you look at his examples of what not to say, none of them are questions. So maybe a better idea is "don't say discouraging things to your founder friends, ask them questions instead."

Those statements are not grammatically questions, but they are questioning statements. You can easily turn them into rhetorical questions:

"LOL, do you really think someone is going to use your search engine over Google?"

GP picked that example because the article explicitly calls it a bad question. The third paragraph of the article:

>Let’s say your friend is obsessed with building a new search-engine. When you ask them why do they believe they can do better than Google, you are literally telling them that they shouldn’t be doing this since if it was ‘correct’ or possible or profitable, then Google would have already done that. This is bad.

It's not the same at all, because that question insinuates that Google is already doing everything close to as best as possible.

Whereas users who use Google may have reasons to use an alternative engine even if it isn't strictly better than Google in every regard.

Probing into who those users might be and what their needs are envisioned to be is more constructive than "can you do better than Google"?

Just frame it as the author recommends: "How will you get your first billion users?"

I don't know if I agree with you. The point of the article is that those questions are not only unhelpful, they're distracting, and you shouldn't be trying to distract a founder. The reason why people are asking those questions is because they themselves are nervous and they're projecting their nerves onto you.

This comment is correct.

It's more the point that sometimes you don't want to have to justify yourself to all and sundry, especially when the person you're talking to has no real insight and wants to appear smart. I've been to loads of events where you just want to have a nice chat and before you know it you're getting a lecture on all the ways in which you're going to fail. One time, I didn't even want to talk about my stuff but was basically forced to have to justify myself.

Do this a few times and it gets exhausting. It's got nothing to do with whether you can answer the questions, and everything to do with the fact that sometimes you just don't want to answer the questions.

"Yeah, that's the kind of thing I spend all day working on, but right now I just want to hang out with you guys and have dinner / play this game / enjoy the party / whatever."

The answer is somewhere in the middle. If you aren’t the end user, asking them these questions doesn’t help. Simply because you aren’t the end user.

You thinking that you know what the end user wants is the same as the founder not talking to end users. In that case, you aren’t helping one bit.

It is the same as a bunch of founders sitting around judging each other’s product. How does that help?

These questions need to be asked by the end user. They are the people ultimately using the product. Only they can say whether it is something they want to use.

I don't agree with this article. Being supportive is not being nice. Being supportive can be cruel.

I do a lot of mentoring for startup founders. I usually get asked to help with pricing and positioning strategy because it's hard to find mentors with that expertise.

In particular, there are two SDG-focused programs I mentor at every year. The founders are very early stage. Some have products and customers, but most just have MVPs and customer interviews.

It's kind of heartbreaking. These new founders have had so much validation. The program and other mentors have told them how they should be admired for following their dreams and how they are the future and will be saving the planet.

Aad I come along and say "OK. How do you know people will buy this? No, sadly, people don't buy things because it's the right thing to do. OK people have said this is 'fun', but how much are they willing to pay?"

My evaluations at the end of these programs tend to be an extreme split between founders who write things like "This was the best 45 minutes of the entire program." and those who write tings like "This mentor just didn't care about me or my startup."

Sigh

You are not doing your friends any favors by simply smiling and and telling them how clever they are. You might be making their lives worse.

It’s possible to hold your view and the view in the article simultaneously. Your role was to critique them. A friend’s role is to be friendly. It’s possible that sometimes someone will want detailed advice and course correction and sometimes emotional support.

For example you might have a different opinion of the phrase “run faster stop being lazy” coming from your spouse rather than your personal trainer.

In my opinion it is much more whether the critique was solicited and in what context it was given. I don’t think I would call someone a friend, if I couldn’t trust them to give me their honest opinion and challenge me with questions. Not specifically about startups, everything in live. But there is a right time and place for things. So, yea emotional support is also important.

I think you are describing is what the radical candor crowd would call “ruinous empathy”, ie lying to avoid hurting their feelings.

There is a difference though between a conversation among friends and a founder seeking advice from a mentor. Telling a friend that their startup is dumb won’t stop them from seeing the idea through anyway, so I think the article is questioning what one hopes to accomplish by being generally negative.

Yeah this doesn’t sound like a friendship type relationship though. I’d expect my friends to be supportive and mostly not clued in on all the details.

In productivity oriented organizations and relationships there are many roles which are more about what you describe - sober, sceptic, detailed, harsh, realistic etc.

The author seems to think questions like "why would someone use you over Google?" automatically come from a place of judgement. But a friend can ask that from a place of curiosity. You can have a conversation about it, where they try to understand and where you see important things you don't have good answers to.

I expect my friends to cheer for me and help me live my best life, but I also expect them to poke and prod and question and sanity-check me when I make big decisions. A friend can be supportive and challenge you at the same time.

I would feel hurt and disappointed if I knew a friend had serious reservations about something I was doing but chose not to voice them, instead putting on a smile and pretending it's a great plan. It doesn't feel very friend-y for someone to cheer me as I metaphorically drive off a cliff.

Oh yeah you’re totally right on that. I guess what I mean is that I wouldn’t expect that friend to do deep research or be informed. Poking is the right word for it because it’s harmless - they wouldn’t be obliged to know all the information to seriously scrutinize what I’m doing.

You sound like a mentor here and not like a friend. Friends are required to be supportive, mentors give advise and direction. Very different relationship

> It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of.

I'm not sure this is a given. Tons of brilliant developers (myself included) build complex products without having ever considered the market, or just assuming that users will come out of the woodwork if it's technically awesome enough.

Seems to me that if a founder doesn't have immediate answers to some of these "existential questions", that's a red flag right there.

Yeah the premise is clearly untrue. People build useless stuff all the time. If you're going to build something without having answers to these questions you need to be honest with yourself that you're doing it for fun, and for many that moment will not come unless they are challenged on it.

Also the only information you really have in this example is that they're smart enough to say the words "I'm building a search engine".

Well, as someone who has literally built a search engine and paid for it out of pocket, I'll argue the profit question is deeply relevant, it's the question you should have an answer for before even considering investing actual money into this field. Most search engines just aren't profitable.

Me, I've chosen to simply reduce burn rate so much it isn't much of a problem. I can do this non-profit because I think the world needs it. But if that isn't you, if you actually want to live off your work, you need an answer to this.

Google makes it work through being a major player in advertisement. If you had Google's search service, but not their advertisement-ability, you would struggle to make ends meet. Maybe you could do like Kagi intends and offer a subscription service. Maybe that will work. Who knows.

How you will compete with Google is a far less tricky question. There are several niches they rather visibly flounder in. I'd estimate their biggest problem is they are trying to do too much at once, making their service not quite great at any given thing. It's reasonably easy to build something that's superior at just one thing.

If people are not paying you and you cannot self sustain why would you think world needs it? In fact, the world is clearly giving you a signal it doesn't need it.

(I am being rhetorical here. It's very easy to break down things this way imo and I think it's the point of the article. talk with your founder friends with compassion and trust)

Well even this I have an answer to: Because I find it useful. That's the entire reason I built my search engine. I'm sharing it with others as a service for others to use if they want. If they do not want to use it, that's also fine. It is a niche service for a niche audience.

I think, if you're going to do any sort of work in public, you need to be able to deal with the fact that there are blunt people who love to share their strong opinions.

It seems really weird not to as ask the question "why would someone use your engine over Google," as a friend because "Why would I use your search engine over Google?" is exactly what every single customer is going to ask, prospective employees and founders aside.

If that's not something they have a cogent answer for, they should probably look into some other line of business.

I disagree with this post (personally). As a founder, being asked by a friend, "why do you believe you can do better than Google" if I'm working on a search engine is exactly what I want to be asked. If I'm founding a search engine startup, that's probably the single question I have the best answer to, and it tees me up really well to give a strong pitch of my core differentiation.

At my previous startup (Heap) I loved answering "how are you different than Mixpanel?" and at my current startup (Airplane.dev) I love answering "how are you different than Retool / Rundeck?"

By contrast, the proposed alternative questions, e.g. "How will you get your first x users?" are much more annoying. I'm happy to answer that kind of question for a VC or a prospective hire, but if a friend asked me this casually I'd find it somewhat tedious to go through our growth strategy.

Just my 2 cents–I'm sure every founder is a bit different in terms of what they like/dislike being asked in a social setting.

Robin Williams had a quote that was along the lines of

"whenever people ask me for advice on how to become a successful comedian, I tell them they won't make it and they should give up. Anyone who listens to me and gives up wouldn't have made it anyways, and that saves them hardship down the road. Anyone who has the determination to make it along the hard path wouldn't listen to me anyways"

In highschool I was friends with a Mormon kid. After graduation I was headed for college and he was headed out on his two year mission trip to Brazil.

Personally, I thought it was a very foolish decision to spend two years going door to door in Brazil. I also thought it was a net negative as I don't believe in Mormonism and don't think it's a good thing to recruit more people to believe in it.

I was conflicted about what to do. Should I try to convince my friend he was wrong to go? Just stay quiet, like this article recommends or ask some politely phrased question?

I wound up splitting the difference and tried gently making the case to him that he wasting his time. I didn't come at the argument as hard or often as I might have and I didn't leave it entirely alone. We had one awkward conversation about it, that I could tell he found off-putting or offensive, and that was that. He went off to Brazil and I never saw nor spoke to him again.

I still don't know what the right thing to do then was and I have the same conflict about the advice in this article. If I genuinely think my friend is making a mistake I shouldn't directly confront them about it? I don't think I buy that, even if it makes things less awkward.

I see the polite rephrase advice as being generally good probably. I'd just say that it's probably different by person. Some people prefer direct challenges. "You'll never do it without a great UI!"

If you doubt your friend's plans. Don't go at it trying to convince him he's wrong. Go at it trying to understand why he thinks it's a good plan. If you want to be direct 'I don't believe this will work without a great UI, am I missing something? ' is much better than 'you'll never do it without a great UI'.

Both are direct and confronting. The first is aggressive, the second is dialogue.

This.

Turn the situation around. How often do you enjoy hearing someone's opinion on something where they haven't even tried to understand your goals, motivations, and values? And instead just spouted off what they think?

> If you want to be direct 'I don't believe this will work without a great UI, am I missing something? ' is much better than 'you'll never do it without a great UI'.

If someone is unable to turn one into the other in their head probably they shouldn’t be doing a startup really. I understand that one shouldn’t be a jerk, but we also don’t have to go around like other people are made of eggshells. “You will never do it without a great UI” is a perfectly fine thing to say if you believe that. A healthy, well adjusted human being can say to that “you are right and this is how we will get a great UI” or tell you “you might think that, but actually” or they might shrug and ignore you or any other variation. If their world collapses from a tinny bit of adversity, and they fold like a wet napkin they should do something less stressfull.

Sure. They can probably handle it. But should being around friends test 'if they can handle what you say'? I hope that is not what my friends think (except for my puns). Especially around friends it would be nice if that is where the pin-pricks stop, and you just get to feel at ease a bit.

I find that as a general rule, it's best to assume that people know what they're doing and what's best for them. So in this case I'd ask why he was doing it, what his motivations were, etc.

Aside: I'd assume that as his friend, you'd already know that it is common for Mormons to do this!

In any event, if it's a life choice like this (or marriage, or a new career), then telling him that he's doing the wrong thing is not likely to result in anything positive, other than you feeling better (?) about yourself.

As a founder, if you don't even have the mental maturity to deal with criticism then start up is probably not for you

The message I get is that if you are a founder's friend, it's not your job to do the heavy criticism. He will get criticism all around the entire day anyway, you don't want to add into it.

But I bet there are reasonable exceptions everywhere. It's way too complex an issue to have such a simple answer.

> if you are a founder's friend, it's not your job to do the heavy criticism

What will your product do that Google doesn't and why can't (aren't) they do(ing) it isn't heavy criticism. It's reality checking.

The article posits questions asked in bad faith. ("You, for some reason, do not really believe in his idea. You, with some self-righteous zeal, also want to save your friend from some tragic failure.") The questions aren't the problem. The motivations of the person asking them are.

The takeaway isn't "don't ask founders existential questions." It's don't surround yourself with "friends" who don't believe in you, won't tell you that to your face and whose conversation consists of backhanded criticism.

I got click baited :(

The title says `Please don't ask founders existential questions`, but the article tells me not to berate my friends with pessimism about their startup ideas. Thanks for the tip!

Indeed. I was curious to discover why founders should not be queried about the existence of God and the nature of reality. Oh well.

I feel like if you’re a founder… you gotta be able to brush that off / have answers (granted you don’t have to get into the weeds with everyone).

Rando existential question guy is going to do his thing regardless.

You're correct that it requires thick skin, but there is such thing as pushing too hard, and I've dealt with that personally when a close friend became almost aggressive in their viewpoint.

If your business skill is good enough to sell your probably-useless thing(Which it may well be), then you'll probably have no problem answering a casual question, right?

Just say it's a privacy preserving deep learning homeomorphic blockchain to end war and famine with a novel proof scheme for your digital legacy and we'll be like "Yep that's some buzzwords, I bet someone will buy it" and move on.

If you don't have an answer at all what will you tell customers?

Perhaps if a founder is too delicate to be asked questions grounded in reality, they should consider a different profession.

Author of the post here. Trying to respond to some of the comments. Firstly, apologies- I didn't intend to make anything click-baity. As a matter of fact, I didn't even post it here. I realized that I could have titled my post like "How to ask founders good questions".

But, and in all honesty, as a founder, it did/does feel such questions are existential. I used _search-engine_ as a mask, I'm actually building a deep-tech (I've commented/posted on HN before).

When you put everything on the line to build a startup for a mission you believe in to the extent that you can't even separate your existence from your startups 90% of the awake hours, then when such questions come from (this is important) "a specific set of stakeholders", it does become existential. I love being asked all these things from a random person or at a random pitch event. But when you're my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with for weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.

Someone below suggested that such people probably shouldn't start a startup, but on the contrary, I wrote it not to whine about myself, but only with the sincere hope that if there's someone who is less tougher than I am, he/she would be more cared for (in the odd chance that someone reads it).

The true origin of this post was in my experience with building my indoor farming startup that will grow the best quality produce, cheaper, and way more resource efficiently than traditional agriculture. Ofc I've done my homework and I am actually taking a risk and doing the very uncomfortable by deciding to work on it. Imagine jumping back and forth between research-papers, circuit diagrams, dying-plants, finance, etc. etc., and then someone very relevant asks/tells you "you can't beat the oldest industry known to humankind", or "why can Infarm (a unicorn in the vertical) not do this?", "maybe just work on indoor grow lights (since it fits more into the standard lean startup model". In that moment, it seems existential. Maybe I interpret it wrong, but I interpret it as if you're telling me that my startup shouldn't (can't exist) and yes I'm so obsessed with my startup that I take it personally (again, only when it comes from specific stakeholders). I can give them the numbers, but if they say it can't be done or if it could have been done, it would have been done, then that's same as saying that I should shut up.

> But when your my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with got weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.

I'm not a founder of anything, so I understand if this is just part of an experience that I've not had, but those are exactly the sorts of people who I would absolutely want to ask these sorts of questions. At least in my life, if I want to do something crazy, it's my close friends, my heroes, and my mentors that I go to first to get advice, and if I'm doing something that they don't see as sensible, I truly hope they tell me. I mean, they have done plenty of times already! And either I can give them a good answer and we can talk it over, or I can't give them a good answer, and then I know I need to think things over - either coming up with a better answer, or realising that what I was doing wasn't as sensible as I thought.

Likewise, I have friends where I hope I can be that person to them as well, and try and offer a critical perspective when I think they're viewing things in a rosier light than they realise. Obviously how you say that is always important, and in moments like that I try hard to frame my own perspective helpfully (and accept that my perspective may be missing something that they're seeing), but if there is a deep enough trust in a relationship, I think those sorts of things are possible and healthy.

"It needed a week's answer, or none."

It's hard because some of the "easy questions" require a long answer - and sometimes you really ARE in a startup that shouldn't exist (or can't exist yet) - and your friends might be the people who need to pull you out.

But often, if it's someone who is "involved" or interested or even a co-founder, they really do have the question and want to know the answer - or at least be reassured that you've thought about it.

A startup is always in the strange place of trying to do something easy enough that a startup can do it, and hard enough that nobody has done it yet.

I enjoyed your post and it resonated with me. Dumping cheap skepticism on a someone who is working hard to do something new is something I wish people would be more thoughtful about. It’s almost a reflex, but is it actually helpful?

The responses on this thread are kind of discouraging and missing nuance. It’s turned into “should you tell the hard truth or pretend the world is a fairy tale” (a false dichotomy) when it’s more like “don’t be a jerk in this moment”.

I made things because I legit thought, "these people are stupid, they haven't leveraged this brilliant insight, I can do this better," and then find out that none of that is true. Dead demos include a protocol for encoding hashes in QR codes for tokenizing all the things in a supply chain, a marketplace for anonymously referring non-fit employees and coworkers out to recruiters to get them hired away, a collaboration tool for producing security features of a product using threat modelling, etc. The conceit beneath each of them was they weren't for anyone, they were in reaction to a situation, and a kind of expression of thwarted nerd revenge on the world. Maybe it's a great impetus for writing pop songs, (though perhaps more emo), but not for making tools for people. They were un-buyable and un-investable for all the reasons.

The question I've learned to ask is, "is there a specific person you have talked to in the last 6 months who this is for and who wants this?" Can't say I always live by that advice, as I still have another troubled-loner-ware project in me, as the creative urge is merciless, but the one thing I would never do is discourage a friend, I would only accelerate them to their next conclusion. The best you can do is help them forward faster, and if they find a dealbreaker, it's better they find it fast and move on to the next one.

Either you empathize with someone and succeed looking at things from their perspective. Or you are the jealous jerk hoping to see them fail.

There is no middle ground, chose who you want to be. Empathy is a lot of work and it hurts too!

If you did the first thought would be something like: "wow, that is hard. He/she must be grinding ways to fail and has to act upon each of them, plan their time and chose their actions carefully. Even if they get everything right success is not guaranteed or perhaps, if there is enough ambition, not even likely."

What the other wants to hear when hard things are on the schedule is a summary of their accomplishments and perhaps how this project is going to present exactly the challenge that should come after it.

Of course one should build walls to keep out the insensitive jerk. Avoid him if needed. Their world is so dull because no one ever shares that what makes them tick with them. A stamp collector will never share with them why he collects stamps. They will never become a stamp collectors.

The jerks world is static, without change and they think they prefer it that way. How dare you suggest there could be more.

But jerks they are by choice. It is no different from telling a homeless person they might never find a home. An unemployed person they might never find work. A beggar that they will probably starve. I think you will never be able to pay your debt. You will probably get back to drinking/drugs/smoking if you try to quit. etc etc

hey, I'm just being objective here! I'm a realist you know!

As a founder you are fighting an uphill battle every step of the way. I'm not sure trying to convince the world to stop with the middlebrow dismissals en masse will bear much fruit. If the naysayers are getting you down you need to find coping strategies like spending time with more positive people, or just not talking about your startup with people who aren't helpful. There's a reason incubators are a thing.

I don't think the author is really thinking about what that question means. If you say you're building a search engine and I ask you why you can do better than Google it's because I want to know why you're going to do better than Google. Clearly if you're building a search engine then you have some idea of what you're going to do better than google. And if not.... well, that's pretty ballsy. Fine, maybe you just think it's an underserved market (it is!), but founders should have an idea of why they will beat the competition, and asking the question isn't dismissive, it's inquisitive.

Is negativity really a thing in our culture?

Business books and blog posts prepare founders for all of the hard negativity they're expected to get for founding a new project. But it's a myth, at least in my experience (living in the U.S.). I don't think this was always true, but it seems true in 2022.

After starting a project a few years ago, I have personally never come across any hard negativity from any close friend or stranger. I know that personally people have doubted our project, but there's so many "politeness" and "encouragement norms" around early tech founders, that negativity rarely gets uttered to my face.

Instead what you get as a founder is a total empty void of silence: nobody cares about your project whatsoever, until it starts to get off the ground on its own. Then there starts to be a bit of negativity. But negativity is so much better than silence, because negativity means you're starting to have an impact on things, or at least enough of an impact for someone to express a negative thought about you in public.

I've read it's common wisdom among pro athletes to not talk trash to great players before a game, so as to not motivate them more. I think this is the reason why: negativity is really energizing. What a gift public negativity would be for an early project. Constant motivation for you and your team to keep going against the odds. Tesla from 2006-2017 might not have survived if nobody cared about what they were doing. Instead, the constant public criticism (or at least debate) just fueled the motivational fire.

But if negativity is energizing: perhaps it's a good thing for early founders to hear more of it? I sincerely believe that 20+ years ago, early founders got way more shit for wanting to start ambitious projects. Perhaps that motivation created a hidden incentive for projects to keep going. It seems like we've gone too far with politeness and encouragement norms surrounding new projects.

Well I expected this blog post to be about something completely different. Really the title should just be "Don't ask founder how their idea is supposed to work". Asking how they are going to complete with <insert competitor here> is 100% valid. That's not an "existential question".

This is nonsense.

> It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of.

Well then they should be able to see an argument that comes from someone who doesn't understand the problem space for what it is. If a founder is going to second guess their life's mission because someone said they didn't think it could work, that founder is not very likely to succeed anyway.

It boils down to "don't criticize peoples ideas" and it is a terrible idea. Even if you're wrong in your criticism, that's up to others to weigh. I want to hear the bad arguments against me, it helps me articulate to myself more clearly why it would work. And I want to hear good arguments against me, I might learn something.

Actually think founders need to look existential questions in the eye, and figure out reasonable answers to them. Yes the questions are better framed in an open-ended non-demeaning way, but asking them will save you from locking yourself up for years building something nobody wants.

Also, building a better version of X is usually less promising than building the first version of Y. Especially when X is pretty well-executed.

Most top startups I see are carving out their own niche: https://topstartups.io/

I'm a founder and I've gotten all lot of these. I usually don't take them to the heart, but at some point you start questioning yourself and they might shine a new perspective on it. They might be right, or they might be wrong, but the answer and the actions are mostly on you.

My take after all this is that you should question your friend, but if the drive is there, there's no point in arguing or being the "rational" one. The best way forward is support.

Personally I love questions. Especially from people with no background whatsoever in business, tech or the field in question. The interest clusters of responses help to attune to public perception.

Amazingly, the main one I get (seven years and counting) is "don't they have that in Japan already?". So on our timeline, entry #3 or something is "Research in Japan". Total waste of money, but a memorable trip!

The questions described don't sound so much like existential questions as rhetorical ones. They are not asked to get an answer but to make a point, that point being that the questioner believes their friend's startup idea is a poor one. So yes, it's generally better to engage with someone you want to persuade by asking actual questions, rather than talking at them with rhetorical ones.

I see people saying "you're gonna need to answer those questions", "brush it off", "you should be able to accept critique". If you're soliciting feedback or making a a pitch, all valid.

If it's just rando's? Nah, those founders should not just accept a high level of noise out there. A lot of people are happy to share their pessimism. That's tiring.

I agree, but for entirely different reasons.

Yes, someone ought to ask those questions; no, it should not be you. Sadly, most of the time someone gets really fired up about an idea, you can't really stop them, even if it is a terrible idea on the face of it. All you can really do is be around to pick up the pieces after they slam headfirst into one of the many obstacles.

This is such a defeatist line of thought.

1) Delusion is a real thing. Some would-be startup founders are deluded and could use help from their friends. Some are not deluded. But, again, some are.

2) Curiosity is a real thing. Asking questions about a startup idea and wondering how it gets around the obvious objections does not equate to saying the idea is worthless.

I disagree with the article. Also existential questions are something different than what the article author believes to be.

And somehow agree with not being mean, but if a person is going to be discourage by such very common and non evil meanly formulated comments, how are they going to survive in the wild?

Still constructive critique is more useful.

Sorry. Existential questions will be asked until they get answered. Because is an okay answer, but it doesn't say anything flattering about you.

Also, if someone is so lost that they think the question needs asking... You may already have gone too deep down the path of burning investor dollars on what may ultimately end up as churn.

As a founder you have to be a little bit delusional in order to balance out all the naysayers in your life (especially the ones who are closest to you!). It's a lonely game until you "make it" - and then everyone suddenly wants to be your friend / family member.

I don't think we should have to play w/ kid gloves around founders. They aren't different from the rest of us.

I imagine there is a correlation between failed founders and "number of question categories deemed askable" that the founder has dreamed up.

>Individuals obsessed with working on hard problems are very rare, so please don’t be a jerk to them.

Is this guy for real? "Obsessed with working on hard problems" describes basically every single university grad. And it's almost always a bad idea.

How about this: go ahead and ask, but without the rhetorical intent of proving that your milliseconds-in-the-making gut reaction contains insights they haven't yet considered.

These questions just seem to soften up valid product/business model criticisms.

More important than either: finding a customer and hearing it from them.

Does anyone have an example of a useful, interesting post that started with "please don't"? (Rhetorical question)

Don't be a jerk but _someone_ is gonna ask these questions. Might as well ask them before they make big sacrifices.

Founders need to be asked those questions. Those are important questions, that the founders should be asking themselves, but also are going to have gaps in asking themselves. The same enthusiasm that causes them to want to work on these problems also causes them to miss vital questions.

Be mindful when asking that type of question. Not every founder needs to hear every question from you. But if they come to you for council, do ask those questions, because a ton of them they'd better have immediate answers to, and the rest they probably should have thought of already. But one of the most valuable services you can provide, as a friend, is to be a sounding board and to make certain they have iterated across all of those questions. That does mean a substantial mental investment from you in maintaining that checklist.

“Why should I read your article?”

Terrible article.

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