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Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

Short answer: you can't (at least not immediately). Longer answer is that a good entrepreneur executes and exposes themselves to the harsh feedback of the market, while a delusional dreamer talks a lot and avoids contact with reality.

For more on this line of thinking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842282

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Thanks. I've been thinking a lot about how a variety of my own weaknesses manifest themselves to produce this effect. A while back, I've found this can happen when you don't even realize it, because sometimes, writing code 'feels more productive', when in fact, it's better to get harsh feedback on something you haven't yet built.

prototype! There's so many tools out there now that it's so easy to create a prototype that is just images and need 0 lines of code. Flinto is a great tool for this and how I pitch a lot of my ideas to friends/strangers with very little effort production side.

In your experience, do VCs/Angels specifically seek these types of entrepreneurs out? It seems the people "spending time at conferences, PR events, etc" are the ones usually getting funding, while the former are not.

What gives you that impression? My impression is that it's fantastically hard to get funding these days if you haven't first proved your ability to execute.

Not disagreeing with you, but I know of or have heard of quite a few people who fall under the category of people who "Instead of selling, which is hard, they spend their time going to conferences and meetups, trying to do PR, talking to biz dev people about partnerships, etc. It all sounds like work, but mainly serves to insulate them from the harsh reality that nobody wants their product." Furthermore, it's incredibly difficult for me, or anyone for that matter, to quantify that. I'd name names of people/companies who I feel that fall under this criteria, but I'll refrain to avoid offending anyone.

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