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Comment by quirkot | Hacker News Reader

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

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My previous business failed. Everything we built was useless. 2.5 yrs.

My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.

The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.

Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

The goal isn't solving a problem (for founders) but to get investor money. The VC system is designed to 100x investments.

People who solve problems while being profitable do not take investment money unless they want to expand or sell.

"What is the exit?" that is the question for every startup.

Many startups simply solve the following problem: Rich person has a massive amount of money, and wants to use some of that to chase risky returns. They don't really know what to do with it, so they become an LP and act as part of a risk sink for crazy ideas. In that way, the pitch decks, logos, landing pages, and breathless hype is, itself, the "problem" in the process of being solved.

You can gamify anything. The concept of VC is sound.

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