Comment by jstummbillig
1 day ago
I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of highly technical startups would not consider something that I as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with the topic.
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
I don't approach it from this angle.
Here's my sanity check when reading something like this on hn: What do you have me believe about the founder/investors? I understand that it's fun and common around here to be arrogant enough to presume that other people are absolute idiots, who are incredibly bad at their jobs, but I am not interested. If all you can bring are "duh" ideas, then that's a red flag.
Unless you can bring really insightful ideas, I am going to err on the side of the people who put years of their time into it and the people who put millions of dollars into it
Are they still going to be wrong? Of course. Am I likely to think the sidechair hn commentator is simply missing something in the bigger picture? Yes (and I can think of multiple concrete things in this case)
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.
I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.
EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.
Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many people with a modest life science background could've told you were physically and statistically impossible on their face. You should be considerably less credulous toward startup grifters.
The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is just not something most people get excited about.
The reason we know about Theranos is that it ended up in court. Plenty of other startups have had obviously impractical ideas that didn't go anywhere.
The reason we know about Theranos is because they took the grift up to a huge level and went from grift to outright fraud once they had to show actual results.
It is not only not unique, but in fact extremely common for startups to be grifts around impossible technical promises, live a few years off gullible investors who have way more money than sens and/or for whom losing a few million dollars on a long shot is just as bad as me wasting a few dollars on a gizmo off Temu I know probably won't work, and which then die out because their ideas obviously couldn't work.
They even sometimes find a niche by pivoting to some vaguely related tech. Say, while flying taxis obviously won't work, a startup trying to build them might find itself developing into a small company building helicopter propeller blades for some specific niche.