Startups say the darndest things
agevik.se
agevik.se
Unless, of course, that every startup founder is a pre-billionaire. ;P
To me this speaks: "We aren't able to clearly explain what we do, but here's this other well-known company that solves a similar problem in a different market. We'll piggy-back from the recognition of their name. Look at us, look at them, and try to make a connection."
If you need to make a connection with something you hope someone is familiar with in order to explain your product, you don't understand your product well enough.
If you can be described as X for Y, then you can make the argument that "it worked for the Z industry".
However if you can't be easily summed up as X for Y, you can claim that this is something completely new that's never been done before. And people like that...I think? I don't know, I'm rather new to this. What do you think?
Still, your complaint might be that, even if works for investors or tech news writers, it shouldn't necessarily be used for prospective employees. In that case, I agree. But I'm sure that, if you happened to be interested in a particular startup that used that formula to describe themselves, they'd be happy to provide you with more details on what they do.
If you don't have a good business idea (or if yours is underdeveloped) you try to create a connection with something a person might already feel positive about.
The problem is that it's a lot easier to imitate the talking points of successful startup than it is to actually imitate the success.
Would you rather work for a company where the investors can't even convince their portfolio companies to use the product? Sure I get the humor. Maybe a solution would be to actually name one of the (hopefully big/famous) companies that use the product, instead of being vague. "Some great places have employed our solution! But we can't reveal any of their names!" Um. Yeah.
There are a number of ways to convince an investor to use a freebee. They aren't losing anything they haven't already lost when they gave you money.
A customer will not (well, most at least) pay for a product that offers nothing in return.
To be honest, the descriptions that stand out most to me are "we have X problem within Y context and we need a solution that will solve Z for us. Can you focus on it exclusively for six months?" Those usually turn out to be the most interesting problems to work on and will probably not attract people who are just interested because of the company is in a particular industry segment or focusing on a certain technology.
Work hard, play hard? You're probably doing neither and your holiday parties suck.
edited: "not attract"
"Work hard play hard" - Yep, the author's right
"Significant Equity" - I guess I've read too much HN to know that that's nothing
"Pre-revenue" - Entirely too much risk to leave your current job to go to; maybe if you were between jobs.
The last thing I avoid is the list of perks that make it seem like your life is work. Sure, perks are nice, but not so I can all my time there. I got a tour of Palantir, and I'm like "This is really sweet." Then I got to their nap time room, where you can sleep for a bit when you're pulling an all nighter. I drew the line there because the way it was positioned was too strongly implying you must spend all your waking hours at work, and then some.
I don't know how to feel about it though. On the one hand I'm hoping it was a joke and nothing more as there are some good apples out there but then I also remember that there are a bazillion little startups that are just either clueless, incompetent, or decent but overhyped and overfunded.