Comment by dgxyz
5 hours ago
I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance.
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
> The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem.
By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market.
I have seen this way to often in other areas. That is the push here as well AI can sort through it. Too many people are held to account for not meeting what amounts to made up numbers.
Someone intentionally doesn't want those numbers seen or applied.