How to critique a startup

This was originally published in my free weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.

People love to make fun of “dumb” startups.

You might remember Juicero, the $500 juicer whose juice bags could actually be squeezed by hand for free.

Mocking these companies is practically a sport, where civilians & tech journalists alike compete to show how smart they are for predicting the demise of a given startup.

But that’s fucking stupid.

It’s easy to make fun of startups. By design most of them go to zero.

Saying a startup is dumb is like predicting a pregnant woman is going to have a healthy child.

You can know nothing about babies and you’ll still almost always be right.

And so it goes with startups. If you made fun of every startup you ever saw you’d be right 95% of the time. And you’d have added nothing to the world.

What’s actually useful:

Almost all critiques are really about making yourself look smarter.

So unless a company is hurting people who have no way to opt out, either lend a hand or get the fuck out of the way.

The Links

What I Learned from Interviewing with the CIA (hackernoon.com, article)

Fun, short story about briefly being inside the CIA interview process. Skip the last 25% once he starts marketing his VC firm.

Make Happy (netflix)

Bo Burnham is the Bob Dylan of my generation. This is his last piece with Netflix (linked to previously).

Singing to his audience:

“The truth is, my biggest problem's you

I want to please you

But I want to stay true to myself

I want to give you the night out that you deserve

But I want to say what I think

And not care what you think about it

Part of me loves you

Part of me hates you

Part of me needs you

Part of me fears you”

Kolyma Tales (amazon, book)

Stories from a man who spent 17 years in the Soviet forced-labor camps in Siberia.

The stories are tragic in how mundane the people are experiencing them. There’s no enlightenment, just misery and suffering.

This was originally published in my weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.