George is bright but not a stable leader. Every month it's some new scheme or feature that will "sell 10x the units!"
No, it won't, not with the lack of support and poor attitude from Comma. If George wants to sell 10x the units it must be a consumer device and treated by Comma as one.
I imagine some company will finally get their shit together, and start buying wholesale and installing in their cars as an option. Until that time it'll continue to grow and still be a niche product
in his own words (from Part 2):
> I’d say that 95% of people I met in the hacker world were good people; only 5% bad. The business world has this flipped. To get ahead in the hacker world you need skills. To get ahead in the business world you need psychopathy.
maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business
Slightly re-phrasing, he said: "95% business people are bad (at helping companies achieve their goals) and 5% are good. The 95% succeed at keeping a job by being psychopaths".
I wouldn't fixate on the word "psychopath". He's not talking about serial killers, just general sleaziness and advancing careers not by being good at their jobs but, say, playing office politics well.
For a concrete example, let's consider that Zoox tweet about organizing Hispanic something event.
It took at least a few people to do it. Someone had to conceive the idea, there had to be a meeting or two discussing it, some exec had to approve it, someone had to execute it and Zoox paid for it, directly for the event and indirectly for the salaries of the people involved.
How much all this activity contributed to Zoox solving self-driving problem? Zero. Nada.
Did it help justify the continuing employment of the people doing it? Yes. Maybe they even got a promotion for going "above and beyond" their duties.
There's an argument that those people are more like parasites, draining the host company of funds, time and attention, advancing their own careers at the expense of Zoox.
For context: this happened 3 years ago.
Zoox still hasn't made a single dollar selling a product. They still hasn't solved self driving.
They got acqui-hired by Amazon for less money that they raised which means that all employees that likely worked there for less money and stock options ended up working there for just less money.
I think part of the problem is that most people in tech are monomaniacs in a multi-disciplinary world. They don't have a good general understanding of what business is, so they make odd generalisations from their own experience (which is usually very narrow) psychoanalyzing people they don't know (anyone who makes such a statement is usually telling you more about themselves than other people).
In tech, most "business people" are bad because they aren't actually running a business but a bureaucracy that has captured a business, and needs to expropriate as much value as possible. The problem is caused by the same narrowness in thought that led to the generalization about 95% of whatever.
It is fairly simple to understand in business terms: these companies are taking money, setting it on fire, and employees are making out like bandits. But this isn't what a business does. The purpose of a business is to deploy and return capital on behalf of shareholders. Again, this requires a multidisciplinary understanding of the world. The world would be a far better place (and we wouldn't be about to go through this next phase) if we had more business people in tech, sadly there are almost none (even running companies, most tech CEOs wouldn't make it past middle management in any other company...their knowledge is just too limited).
If you think this is limited to tech, you're outing yourself as not having much experience outside of tech. The whole world runs on Rules for Rulers, Ponzi schemes, and confidence games.
Lean, scrappy, profitable, and ahead? One negative comment on HN isn't exactly a crisis. A fluctuation in "profitable" wouldn't exactly be a crisis, either, given that the rest of this industry looks like a money bonfire.
> maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business
Neg harder.