Comment by Aurornis

11 hours ago

I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.

That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.

Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.

> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.

Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.

The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.