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I'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American!

I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.

Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.

Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?

"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.

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He diluted his vision to garbage on the first enterprise customer. Because he needed to sell now. From OP, there is visible urgency to do sales even when the product is not ready.

Tesla was overhyped in the first decade after acquisition by Musk; it was bleeding money for 15 years. Arguably, the first Tesla cars were worse and pricier than traditional cars.

My point is that compared to the US, in Europe you have very few stories of successful stealth startups or startups that have needed lots of money for many years. That is a main reason why we cannot create a frontier LLM lab.

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I know you're getting downvoted but this is painfully true, especially the part about the founder 'choosing which promise to break'. Something I've observed in many Europeans (really just any region with very conservative financing) is that they view venture capital as a system where ideas immediately take off or are doomed to fail. They don't think about how Apple, Amazon, Tesla, etc, took years of trial & error, making tradeoffs, breaking promises, and creating multiple product lines to deliver more and more value. Of course, maybe there's not much disruption to be done in the oven industry (I'd suspect that's actually the case in reality) but Microsoft started off as a flight simulator company; you can just pivot.
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weak minds can't comprehend this but indeed, this is the ultimate goal to reach in life: hyping shit up to out-con the conmen into giving you money so you can disrupt things.

just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it

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Yeah bro like why would you just build what you want to your vision? Other people don't want that! Other people know what they want, just build what they want!
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"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Henry Ford.
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