If you haven’t seen it, there’s a thread here with links to Sarah Constantin’s postmortem and Zvi’s semi-postmortem, plus another comment from each of them.
I’ll excerpt Zvi’s comment from that thread:
Most start-ups fail. Failing at a start-up doesn’t even mean that you, personally are bad at start-ups. If anything the SV-style wisdom is that it means you have experience and showed you will give it your all, and should try again! You don’t blow your credibility by taking investor money, having a team that gives it their all for several years, and coming up short.
I think Constantin’s postmortem is solid and I appreciate it. She says this:
But there was a mindset of “we want to give people the best thing, not the thing they want, and if there’s a discrepancy, it’s because the customer is dumb.” I learned from experience that this is just not true—when we got complaints from customers, it was often a very reasonable complaint, due to an error I was mortified that we’d missed.
As she says in the linked thread, Zvi’s postmortem is “quite different.” Constantin discusses the faults of their business strategy, Zvi attributes the failure to people wanting symbolic representation of healthcare rather than healthcare.
Is there truth to Zvi’s position? It is the sort of thing I am inclined to nod my head along with and take him at his word—if Constantin weren’t expressly saying that the issue was legitimate grievances, not signaling. I think her story is more plausible because it seems like less of a deflection and fits my model of the world better. But either way, I think the postmortem should’ve been about why Zvi failed to observe that facet of the world and what he plans to change, not about how the world sucks for having that facet.
I do agree with the quoted comment. A failed start-up is not the end of the world, it doesn’t mean the founder is incompetent, or that they need to step back and let others try.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a thread here with links to Sarah Constantin’s postmortem and Zvi’s semi-postmortem, plus another comment from each of them.
I’ll excerpt Zvi’s comment from that thread:
I think Constantin’s postmortem is solid and I appreciate it. She says this:
As she says in the linked thread, Zvi’s postmortem is “quite different.” Constantin discusses the faults of their business strategy, Zvi attributes the failure to people wanting symbolic representation of healthcare rather than healthcare.
Is there truth to Zvi’s position? It is the sort of thing I am inclined to nod my head along with and take him at his word—if Constantin weren’t expressly saying that the issue was legitimate grievances, not signaling. I think her story is more plausible because it seems like less of a deflection and fits my model of the world better. But either way, I think the postmortem should’ve been about why Zvi failed to observe that facet of the world and what he plans to change, not about how the world sucks for having that facet.
I do agree with the quoted comment. A failed start-up is not the end of the world, it doesn’t mean the founder is incompetent, or that they need to step back and let others try.