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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

I know that Sam knows 100 times what I do about failing startups, and that some probably do fail for this reason. But I think this meme that "your startup probably failed just because you stopped trying hard enough" is awful.

Even Sam says IN THIS ARTICLE that "Also, very small startups can grow by sheer force of will, even with a bad product." Looking at the TechCrunch reviews, I think probably half of these companies will turn out to be pretty bad products in hindsight that could never have gone anywhere.

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That's why I said:

"instead of relentlessly focusing on building a great product..."

But I think it's probably very difficult to tell a great/bad product from reading a paragraph on TechCrunch.

I wouldn't say that any of these are bad based on TechCrunch; I mean more that there were something like 3 products that sell machines that sell food, and there's a chance in 10 years we'll say "there was no way that a food-machine product could have become a large business". And regardless of how hard they all work, I don't think it's possible that there will be 3 different "billion-dollar businesses" here.

First I agree with you that I don't get a lot of YC startups, including the food selling machines at their current state. I do think that one of the more inefficient aspects of life is how humans handle food, from producing, transporting, storing to cooking/eating. There are just too much waste in every step of that chains. More depressingly, this is waste that doesn't necessarily go back to support the environment like the salmon leftover from the bears. Improving efficiency in any step in this chain is huge for humankind, and potentially worth a lot of money too. I don't know if the YC food startups have that goal in mind, or they are more going for the "oh this is cool" aspect.

Actually this is the standard feedback in MLM and pyramid schemes. It can never be the system because we are rich already: it must be you.

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