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Comment by simple-thoughts | Hacker News Reader

This post reminds me of a founder I worked for. We had a pitch meeting where one of the prospective investors laid out exactly why the founder’s idea was fundamentally flawed based on the investor’s personal experience as a past founder working on a variant of the same idea. The investor also explained what paths forward our founder could take with clear and actionable ideas before the rejection.

After the rejection the founder told us “the investor is biased because he failed so if we succeed it will hurt his ego” and proceeded to ignore all his advice. Well 6 months later when we tried to get users on the platform everything the investor had said turned out true and the startup limped along for another couple years on angel funds, thankfully without me.

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I thought about saying that bit of it more explicitly. But chose not to.

That said, there is a fine line. You want someone who defends their opinion on how things should be done.. And also someone who takes feedback. Therefore it seems valuable in the interview process to try to give feedback, and observe how the person responds. With HOW they process feedback being more important than whether or not they changed their minds.

Processing feedback by telling the internets about it would seem to be...a negative signal.

Speaking of negative signals the startup website linked in the substack comes across as one.

A lot of medical buzz words in what is becoming a very crowded area for AI (this is the third opthalmology related AI startup I’ve heard about this month) without any real substance to their claims, details or publications. Opthalmology is the farthest thing from my specialty (radiology) so I can’t comment whether the problem being described is worthwhile but there is also little to no detail provided.

The only substance is the EMNLP paper which is vaguely described as award winning although unspecified and was an interesting read but in my opinion objectively isn’t sufficiently technically impressive to be the whole pitch and hyped on the startup homepage and doesn’t really lend much direct credibility for the problem tackled.

Some of the links are also broken on mobile Safari.

Finally, the author of this article and co-founder is described as “MD Candidate” on the startup page yet his CV states he finished his masters in 2023 and was at Lyft. If this means “admitted to medical school but hasn’t started” suggesting that status imparts any qualification or medical expertise is a huge red flag.

I fully appreciate that this may be a stealth startup but that website is being linked in the post so I interpret that as an advertisement and intended to be read.

Hope to be proven wrong when more comes out but I’d suggest refining that website a bit more.

I was a co-founder of a startup in 2014, and we applied to an incubator that had experience with hardware startups, and domain expertise.

Here's where it got interesting, my co-founder was friends with the founder of another much more established startup in a vaguely similar space. The leader of the incubator was under the impression we were focusing on a different idea (we considered as a secondary, later opportunity) and concerned about a conflict between the two startups. If we had listened to his suggestion, we probably could have come up with a successful product opportunity.

At the end of the day, It was my own stupid fault for not listening closer to what was said, and analyzing the option to pivot into a more successful path.

I think there is a difference between ignoring someone’s advice because it would “hurt his ego,” and believing that a fail in the past doesn’t mean a fail in the future. (- false fail if you will)

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