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Comment by sas41 | Hacker News Reader

It really is cool, but what I don't understand is why do we need all this techno-babble-esque wording around the idea of "3D printed wood", just call it that.

I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the true concept of things.

    We re-use wood-waste to 3D print objects.

So simple, to the point and just as cool.

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Because people who don’t know anything are moved by technobabble and underwhelmed by reality.

I would honestly hazard a guess that there's no marketing person on the team yet. If the founder is in charge of the content of the site, which could very well be the case, they are more likely to use technical terms because it's natural to them. Plus, it's the more boujee option.

Investors, plain and simple. Many investors don’t know tech, or have a limited knowledge about it, so pitching things in terms and phrases that impress them works.

Really? I’d have thought investors were busy people, asking questions like “so what does it actually do”? Like, for example, my management rarely cares about the brilliance of my code. They want to know what it accomplishes —- before they’re off to a different meeting.

What is it? "a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere"

What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to remain in place in their forests".

How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and lignin into assets for present and future generations."

It's a pretty coherent description of the technology, aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of the technology itself

Evaluating pitch decks semi-regularly, I certainly want to grab founders and shake them while yelling "what does it actually do?" fairly regularly. A lot of founders clearly think they need to try to bamboozle investors with pointlessly vague and buzzword laden language.

But part of that is because they get told it works and/or experience themselves that trying to explain the actual technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases.

I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders about a company that we actually ended up investing in where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually understood the subject and wanted to understand if they did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch deck.

Sometimes in conversations like that you can hear the relief when they realise they can actually speak normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to know to excited about being able to expand on details instantly.

Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises the bullshit isn't working.

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