Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Had several: last minute airline seat bidding app with an interested airline. Fishing competition app with paying users. Housing valuation app for a city council, with the actual city council interested and opening up their API to us. The city council also wanted a parking app and water billing app. A telco requested a reloading app that was basically CRUD but offered 6 digits for a few days of work. There was a diet app with thousands of monthly active users and hundreds of dollars in monthly sales.

The failure reasons were all the same: business partners who sat on money and did nothing.

These people were not incompetent. They've built companies before. They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. They've dedicated decades of their careers to building these connections. I personally burned my credibility setting up some of these meetings.

The problem was they didn't show up. Why didn't they show up?

"The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them."

Nobody is naturally too lazy to take money that's lying in front of them. These people have been conditioned to think that work is for fools. They love doing strategic shit like picking domain names and researching target market. They'll never actually talk to the target market though. One entrepreneur even hired a "personal assistant" to do the talking, except the assistant was incompetent and just pissed everyone off.

Laziness is fine. Arrogance is fine. But anyone with a contempt for hard work will not get anywhere.

> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8.

I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership.

I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning towards the idea that you're looking for the wrong indicators.

When I got to RX-8 I laughed heartily. Nice car != success but the RX-8 isn't even that nice. It's quirky and enthusiasts like it, that's it.

GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression?

My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success

> GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression?

You captured it well in your next sentence:

> My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success

Either financial success or irresponsibility.

This probably means a lot less if you live in a developed country. Malaysia probably has some of the most expensive cars in the world. They're like student loans in the US. People here get very emotional about them because they're "necessary". You can live without a car, but it limits your opportunities by a lot. A car often takes 9 years to pay off, the prices are artificially high thanks to bad government policies, and it'll roughly cost 1/3 the price of a house for that period of time if you're frugal.

An RX-8 back when I knew the guy would cost about 25% of a good tech salary (senior big tech, or tech lead/CxO on a smaller one), on a 9 year loan. It's not a family car. And it's the cheaper of the three.

I bought my first car at 32, with a manager job, and that was with quite a lot of arguments with my wife. It's a cheapish MPV.

I have some emotional anchors to those cars. Partly because I ride with them going to a client's office. Partly because it's the last thing I see from them.

As for partnering with them, there's a longer story and every story is different, but it's not car related. Most had proven themselves to some extent. In some cases they had already had the deal on the table, and just needed a prototype. And somehow I went from prototype guy to only person who cared. It's why I couldn't close some of those deals myself.

I learned a LOT from this reply. Thanks for your patience in writing it out; it seems to mirror what I witnessed elsewhere e.g Australia, and it's starkly different from our situation in the US.

Given the context, I can't blame you for assigning significance to a car.

What indicators are you looking for to avoid making the partnerships you described?

We actually would buy cars in Australia as students and ship it to Malaysia. Even with the weaker currency and shipping costs, it was a good deal. That's how bad it is in Malaysia. The long story was that Malaysia invested a lot in car manufacturing to become a high tech industrial country, which failed, so the gov taxed foreign cars and stunted public transport.

I think the best model is personality + incentive. It's probably worth a couple chapters to discuss. But basically incentive is the time domain - can you continually incentivize them on such a slope to act in your interest?

Personality is what kind of incentive they expect. Some people would lose their jobs for an affair. Some just want to appear successful. I know a guy whose life was changed by meditation, so he gave up his whole career and traveled the world helping people with stress. Everyone is a mix of things and place different weights on different things.

So you want to model people and see that they align with whatever your specific venture is. Someone suited to one venture may not be suited for another. And there's a time component too, so someone great 5 years ago may be unsuitable now.

Yes, i think that cultural divide is what confused people. In the US, those are cars that yuppies buy after their first paycheck.

Original post reads as you have grudge because they were lazy.

Sorry to say but this explanation got me thinking.

Maybe those people actually had real insight that these ventures were not good investments. So I would not be so demeaning because they stopped being interested when it turned out there is a lot of work to be done and a lot of money to be spent. That it was good business idea for you - as you mention your time seemed to be worth less - it was not a good idea for them.

From reading both comments it seemed that you could benefit greatly from those deals and for them putting focus/money elsewhere was more beneficial.

As you wrote that comment and seem to have grudge against them, they took easy way out by not confronting you directly on that.

I still might be wrong but maybe they were gracious enough to leave you alone and not shatter your dreams.

I have seen in developed countries if you are sales person with a shiny car like BMW they will not deal with you and better strategy is to get high end VW to have nice stuff inside but from outside to seem like a decent person not a flashy sales scammer.

I drive a 20 year old middle-class car. I drive it because it's been reliable and fuel-efficient, and I have no reason to replace it.

GP would judge me as financially unsuccessful and not pay me any mind if I needed a problem solved.

GP has been played by these "mercedes having" people and GP's own pre-conceived immature notions about status-signaling.

The GP added more context in another comment. There are some cultural differences at play here.

It's not the full data set. It's about 1/3 of all things past prototype stage, and half of failures. It's the failures between prototype and market. Some fail when they hit market. These didn't even hit market, so they're just pointless incomplete failures. No big wins yet, but enough to make a career of it.

If anything, the data makes me biased against people with nice cars. I expected most of the outrage to be from those who bought expensive cars.

Many of the relatively successful ones have been partners who owned no cars, though one guy has a very nice MPV.

Accepting GP didn't intend to imply this but, generally speaking, many people would judge you as unsecessful but that is their problem and not yours.

I drive a 12 year old car that has been reliable as any new car I've owned and drives pretty much as well too. The fact that I am not impressing anyone as a consequence is something I've grown to be comfortable with as I have gotten older.

I’ve been burned a few times but realized how I need to vet and communicate better before and while working with someone. I had a chance to see a venture fail for reasons other than an incompetent cofounder which was educational. And I had great success in my most recent venture.

You listed at least 4 ventures this was the cause of. I hope you have realized what you need to change as well.

Have you considered that you’re a common denominator in your half dozen examples? How could they all fail the same way with different people to blame?

There are plenty of other experiments.

One failed because nobody wanted to fund it, right during a crypto boom. It might be a bad idea too. Who knows? But everyone moved on to better projects.

One failed because we tried to clone Blue Apron but local logistics and payment infra wasn't mature enough.

One failed because of scope creep.

One failed because the CEO was bullshitting investors and they pulled out. It may not be related but probably is.

Some failed because I was the lazy one who didn't feel good about committing.

All of those did not fail from lack of hard work. But they're less interesting. Laziness is the one I'm really pissed about. It's also possible they'd fail later, but they did not get that far.

There's successes too, but that's off topic.

I got the idea that those were good ventures for parent poster but not for those partners. Then those partners gracefully withdrew, maybe they knew more that parent poster.

I've met similar people who'll spend forever talking the talk but as soon as it gets to laying down some cash or doing some physical/mental work they lose interest very quickly.

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