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Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

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Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#11

Post by austinjp »

powerapple wrote: post #9

I think it is CEO's job to keep investors hope high. A engine doesn't work like magic anyway, you are always going to customize it. Thinking TensorFlow as a engine. I don't see anything wrong with that. Anything can be boring, and CEO has to make it exciting. I have this experience with my recent project that I am in charge of, the team facing a lot of doubts and pushes because I didn't draw the picture sexy enough f…

Lying to investors is not okay, and OP describes a CEO who they believe is flagrantly lying.

This is a kind of "excitement" no company needs.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#12

Post by austinjp »

powerapple wrote: post #10
retsibsi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where is the snake oil Doesn't the original post describe a CEO lying to potential investors about a product that doesn't exist? Maybe that doesn't map perfectly to the 'snake oil' analogy, but it's close enough. Not everyone is comfortable with dishonesty. If it's a necessary part of doing business in this field, fine, maybe the OP needs to hear that. But lies are lies, even if sometimes they work.

isn't deep learning engine a set of scripts to solve some problems anyway? Are they trying to build PyTorch and TensorFlow? If they are proving solutions for customers, it does exist. Sometimes developer don't see the value of things because they are dealing with it everyday. For us it is scripts, for other people, it could be magic.

No. OP has described a liar. A truthful version would be "we don't have this but my team can build it". This is not what's happening.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#13

Post by zerr »

austinjp wrote: post #12
powerapple wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't deep learning engine a set of scripts to solve some problems anyway? Are they trying to build PyTorch and TensorFlow? If they are proving solutions for customers, it does exist. Sometimes developer don't see the value of things because they are dealing with it everyday. For us it is scripts, for other people, it could be magic.

No. OP has described a liar. A truthful version would be "we don't have this but my team can build it". This is not what's happening.

I doubt Microsoft has achieved the deal with IBM with the truthful version about "their" OS.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#14

Post by amorphous »

You seem to have a capable CEO that is able to bring in the funding. Unless he is blatantly lying I'd say what you are experiencing is pretty standard. Throwing in some buzzwords is not selling snake oil. It used to be "big data", now it's "AI", next it'll be "blockchain".

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#15

Post by badpun »

austinjp wrote: post #11
powerapple wrote: post #9

I think it is CEO's job to keep investors hope high. A engine doesn't work like magic anyway, you are always going to customize it. Thinking TensorFlow as a engine. I don't see anything wrong with that. Anything can be boring, and CEO has to make it exciting. I have this experience with my recent project that I am in charge of, the team facing a lot of doubts and pushes because I didn't draw the picture sexy enough f…

Lying to investors is not okay, and OP describes a CEO who they believe is flagrantly lying. This is a kind of "excitement" no company needs.

> This is a kind of "excitement" no company needs.

Citation needed? It would be good to have a (probably impossible to perform) study that compares the performance of companies where CEO is lying vs the ones where they're only telling the truth. From my personal experience, I've seen a lot of success built on lies.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#16

Post by shoo »

powerapple wrote: post #10
retsibsi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where is the snake oil Doesn't the original post describe a CEO lying to potential investors about a product that doesn't exist? Maybe that doesn't map perfectly to the 'snake oil' analogy, but it's close enough. Not everyone is comfortable with dishonesty. If it's a necessary part of doing business in this field, fine, maybe the OP needs to hear that. But lies are lies, even if sometimes they work.

isn't deep learning engine a set of scripts to solve some problems anyway? Are they trying to build PyTorch and TensorFlow? If they are proving solutions for customers, it does exist. Sometimes developer don't see the value of things because they are dealing with it everyday. For us it is scripts, for other people, it could be magic.

Quoting OP:

> the CEO is going to investors pitching the fact that we've built/are building some deep learning engine that can be applied to all problems.

> If they are proving solutions for customers, it does exist.

From the perspective of a client with a particular project, provided the client's needs are met at a reasonable price, they are happy. It does not matter if their needs are met by application of some state of the art proprietary general purpose AI tech, or by application of standard open source technology and a lot of hours of consulting/professional services work.

From the perspective of an investor, there is a huge difference between a company that has state of the art proprietary AI tech, and a company that merely offers professional services using the same tech than any competitor has access too.

The former company has a much bigger competitive advantage / "moat" and is likely a far better long term investment.

Claiming that you have proprietary tech to potential investors when you don't is fraud.

Claiming that you are planning to build such tech is perhaps not fraud if you are indeed planning to build such tech, it'd be up to the investor to evaluate how likely that endeavour is to succeed.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#17

Post by ljw1001 »

amorphous wrote: post #14

You seem to have a capable CEO that is able to bring in the funding. Unless he is blatantly lying I'd say what you are experiencing is pretty standard. Throwing in some buzzwords is not selling snake oil. It used to be "big data", now it's "AI", next it'll be "blockchain".

> the CEO is going to investors pitching the fact that we've built/are building some deep learning engine that can be applied to all problems.

> there is no 'engine'; we're a consulting company.

This is pretty close to fraud. There's a huge difference in return to investors between skilled data scientists doing one-offs, and an engine that does the work on its own. If they're not even trying to build a generic AI engine, it's over the line.

> Unless he is blatantly lying I'd say what you are experiencing is pretty standard.

I would say that he is lying, if the description of the situation is accurate, and that "what you are experiencing is pretty standard" isn't _really_ true. But it's not far wrong either. And that's unfortunate.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#18

Post by ionised »

powerapple wrote: post #9

I think it is CEO's job to keep investors hope high. A engine doesn't work like magic anyway, you are always going to customize it. Thinking TensorFlow as a engine. I don't see anything wrong with that. Anything can be boring, and CEO has to make it exciting. I have this experience with my recent project that I am in charge of, the team facing a lot of doubts and pushes because I didn't draw the picture sexy enough f…

So, lies and deceit to increase investor confidence?

Wasn't this a big factor in the financial crash?

Doesn't seem like a good plan at all.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#19

Post by ljw1001 »

If the CEO doesn't deliver something either (a) very much like an engine that can scale the business without hiring data scientists for every job, or (b) some other very exciting thing, he's going to have a tough time.

Maintaining investor confidence is almost as critical to a CEO as raising money.

Re: Ask HN: Have any of you left a startup that was selling snake oil?

#20

Post by mabynogy »

I detect that from the beginning now. In your case it can't become big because consulting doesn't scale. As they are into AI, they won't even think at trying to scale consulting.

Next time, negotiate nothing less than cofounder at least to get a control over the purpose of the company.

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