Our rejection email went viral on Reddit yesterday.
People are shocked a company would tell a candidate exactly why they got rejected.
We're shocked that's shocking.
We asked for 3 sentences about a hard bug.
We got four paragraphs about "holistic approaches to software craftsmanship."
The take-home used temp1, temp2, temp3 as variable names.
Our company name was misspelled twice in the paragraph about attention to detail.
We told them all of that. Directly.
And we told them the door is open if they come back with work that shows they wrote it and read it before sending.
We review code the same way.
Direct. Specific. No hand-waving.
That's just how we build.
VCs are notorious for bad behavior, but I have a story where the tables got turned:
The founder of the first startup I joined was a crusty Texan in his 60s with a DGAF attitude. He would say things like, “If you’re gonna eat shit, you might as well gobble it.”
We were a hot company and had half a dozen term sheets in hand. The three top VCs in Silicon Valley reached out to us and said they’d like a shot at the deal.
Our founder said, “Great, you’re welcome to visit us any time.”
They all responded with some variation of:
“But… that’s not how it works. Founders come to Sand Hill Road to pitch us.”
In his Texas drawl, our founder told them:
“No problem. We’ll be here if you change your mind.”
The next week all three firms were in our office. All three gave us term sheets, but…
Our crusty founder told them all no. I’m convinced he did it just to F with them.
But it worked. He created a feeding frenzy. One of the firms offered to double the valuation.
🤝 Done and done.
The entire $60 million raised went into the founder’s pocket (the company was already profitable). He hired a CEO and sailed off into the sunset.
And that’s how it’s done, son.
When I spoke out against the Gaza genocide, a bunch of midwit VCs ganged up on me both in public and tried to hurt me in private too.
Many of those who stood by me were also VCs. Just the better ones. Both morally, and in return profile.
The best way to avoid sociopaths is to have them self select out of your life by standing for your beliefs.
@AnthropicAI
It seems @claudeai android version has a problem with time assesment on device.
It's showing me cannot use until 7 pm, when it's already 7:15 pm IST
Kindly fix this please
Corruption is no longer in suitcases full of cash.
It is now structural, institutionalized and "legal".
That is why most Indians fail to see it.
#NewIndia#corruption
@maahirpanchal Do casting companies have in-house x-ray facilities or call external testing services ?
Are these xrays digital or still old school film based ?
Somebody build Mechanical Engineering bootcamp videos.
We have 100s of videos on Python, C++, MERN, etc.
What about gears? FEA? CFD? CAD? Fluid Mechanics? Design of Machines?
Each can have it's own bootcamp
@Infinityapp_in I have questions about your onboarding process.
Please give me e-mail addresses or X profile of your founder's where I can dm them.
WhatsApp Support & account manager has tried their best but have not been able to help me.
Indian hardware startups don't compete with Chinese hardware startups.
They compete with Chinese contract manufacturers.
A 2W EV startup in Bengaluru is a 40-person team designing a scooter.
The Foxconn-tier EMS in Dongguan they're benchmarked against is 40,000 people who have built scooters for the last twelve clients and will build for the next twelve.
When the Indian founder says "our BOM is ₹38,000," the Chinese EMS quotes ₹26,000 not because their cells are cheaper, but because they've already amortised the tooling for the motor controller across six other brands.
India doesn't have a hardware startup problem.
It has a contract manufacturing depth problem.
Until somebody builds the Indian equivalent of a Luxshare or a BYD Electronics a tier that absorbs the design risk and spreads tooling cost across twenty customers every hardware founder here is paying a 30-40% "first-of-its-kind" tax that their Shenzhen counterpart stopped paying in 2009.
get wealthy. not to join the pseudo-elites. but to outlast them. to fund the orphanage instead of mourning its necessity. to build the alternative instead of eulogizing the original. to put real weight behind the values you are currently expressing from a position that has no leverage to make them real.
everyone talks about how all the frontier labs are eating companies left and right with new features.
but i swear i've stopped using at least a dozen random SaaS tools because @cloudflare has quietly shipped entire replacements for them.
@olsenbdnr Perhaps elaborate a bit more on what you mean by "Scam X Ads", maybe the public at large would increase reporting & perhaps even brainstorm solutions.