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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> Founders frequently convince themselves that this new person they hired is an expert on this topic, and they should defer to them.

I've more often heard of the opposite problem. Especially when the founding team has zero education or experience in some domain, but makes up for it with ego.

Maybe a good practice is that, when a founder's intuition doesn't agree with the team's expertise, they should discuss, and try to arrive at better understanding and decisions than any of them could've individually.

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+1 on the opposite problem being much, much more common. Especially in any domain or application where there is some deep science or subject matter expertise involved.

I've seen countless VC-funded startups which promise to combine "shiny technology X" with "problem Y" to create "amazing product Z". A lot of times, I know for a fact that "technology X" has never even been shown to make a difference on "problem Y". As in, I can point to literature of some sort that shows how it has a marginal effect at best, or is prohibitively expensive relative to existing state of the art. That doesn't necessarily mean "product Z" is a bad idea... but _so_ many ego-driven startup founders get fixated on selling the technology story instead of the product story.

Maybe the current macro-economic climate will wipe a lot of these guys out, since they'll be forced to figure out how to execute on the product side instead of selling the same ol' obvious BS tech/science story.

But maybe at some point tech X has improved enough that it can make a difference, and you would never know if those ego-driven founders didn't try.

Few startups - unless they're extremely well funded and have leadership with backgrounds in research and the technical domains in which they're specializing - invest a fraction of the R&D tat would be necessary to improve the tech. In a best case scenario, someone external publishes an innovation which the company can pivot towards to save their butts.

For everyone else? Might as well light piles of millions of dollars on fire.

Complete failure of the innovation system to rely on ego-driven founders with no technical background making risky bets with low probability of success.

I totally made this mistake many times. Oh they are a marketing agency, they must be experts in this.

Well maybe they are, but they don’t know MY customer. I’ve spoken to 1000s of my customers at this point. It doesn’t always matter what industry standard is, it matters what my customer wants.

I think the author is speaking only from the perspective of dealing with tech companies in the VC domain. With that context, what you quoted makes complete sense. Which is another discussion in itself.

> I've more often heard of the opposite problem.

Yeah, my guess is this is the more common case for a randomly selected startup. But I suspect Casey doesn't advise a randomly selected sample of startups.

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