Comment by sverhagen
1 day ago
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)