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Isn’t this what they always tell startups to do? Fake it and get product market fit. I recall the stories of task rabbit where the founder was delivering all th

Isn’t this what they always tell startups to do? Fake it and get product market fit. I recall the stories of task rabbit where the founder was delivering all the meals.

pyman 1y ago
See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Builder.ai-Strengthens-Leadership-with-Craig-Saunders-from-Amazon-as-New-Vice-President-of-Artificial-Intelligence https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...
- tacheiordache 1y ago
  You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.
  - oblio 1y ago
    All voice assistants, at least the original iterations, are only good for 3-4 trivial things people actually want. And they've been around for a decade at this point.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      It’s a kitchen timer, music player, and weather sayer. That’s surely worth the $30 I paid.
      - jaymzcampbell 1y ago
        I had to laugh, these are literally the only three things my wife and I use ours for. At a stretch, I'll count the multi-room speaker sync as a great value add to the OOTB audio playback. Anything else, forget it.
      - codegrappler 1y ago
        Don’t forget grocery list add-er!
    - Yeul 1y ago
      I will never talk to a computer until they are sentient.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Gothmog69 1y ago
    What makes it crappy? I find it really good at voice detection
- manuelisimo 1y ago
  so, yeah, but not enough?
mrtksn 1y ago
IMHO you are not supposed to fake your core value proposition when taking money. If the AI part was an implementation detail probably wouldn’t have been a problem.
Aurornis 1y ago
"Fake it till you make it" was about presenting yourself as an established, stable company to overcome objections about using a startup. Things like having a "Customer Support" phone number and e-mail address that just go to the founders, for example. It's fair game if the founders are actually picking up the phone and doing customer support, and it overcomes one objection people might have about using a startup instead of a big company. Claiming you can do something specific (use AI to do something) and then using humans to do the labor is something else entirely. If you raise money on that, it's just fraud.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    If Reddit create a material number of fake accounts and reported those as a key metric for fundraising, that would be fraud. I think the story has been exaggerated a lot, though. The original story was that the admins were doing real submission activity (links, etc.) but they had a mechanism to create a new user account with the submission. So they created a lot of new user accounts for themselves, but the activity was real and driven by the founders. We all have test accounts on our production systems. If it's a tiny number of the overall users at time of fundraising it doesn't matter. On the other hand if they created 10,000 accounts and then claimed they had 11,000 users that would be blatant fraud. I really don't think they did anything like that, though. I think they seeded the very initial site with content and made different "accounts" for it, but by the time they raised they had real traffic.
    - spwa4 1y ago
      ... and what if Twitter does it? Because at the very least they killed most countermeasures to bots and a serious percentage of activity on twitter is "fake engagement". I also have a much more difficult question: Could you explain how this fraud works/applies if nation states are the ones developing the bots? Is there a difference between foreign and US bots?
drewda 1y ago
"Do things that don't scale" to quote Sir PG.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Isn’t this what they always tell startups to do? Fake it and get product market fit. I recall the stories of task rabbit where the founder was delivering all the meals.

pyman 1y ago

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Builder.ai-Strengthens-Leadership-with-Craig-Saunders-from-Amazon-as-New-Vice-President-of-Artificial-Intelligence https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

tacheiordache 1y ago
You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.
- oblio 1y ago
  All voice assistants, at least the original iterations, are only good for 3-4 trivial things people actually want. And they've been around for a decade at this point.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    It’s a kitchen timer, music player, and weather sayer. That’s surely worth the $30 I paid.
    - jaymzcampbell 1y ago
      I had to laugh, these are literally the only three things my wife and I use ours for. At a stretch, I'll count the multi-room speaker sync as a great value add to the OOTB audio playback. Anything else, forget it.
    - codegrappler 1y ago
      Don’t forget grocery list add-er!
  - Yeul 1y ago
    I will never talk to a computer until they are sentient.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Gothmog69 1y ago
  What makes it crappy? I find it really good at voice detection
manuelisimo 1y ago
so, yeah, but not enough?

mrtksn 1y ago

IMHO you are not supposed to fake your core value proposition when taking money. If the AI part was an implementation detail probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

Aurornis 1y ago

"Fake it till you make it" was about presenting yourself as an established, stable company to overcome objections about using a startup. Things like having a "Customer Support" phone number and e-mail address that just go to the founders, for example. It's fair game if the founders are actually picking up the phone and doing customer support, and it overcomes one objection people might have about using a startup instead of a big company. Claiming you can do something specific (use AI to do something) and then using humans to do the labor is something else entirely. If you raise money on that, it's just fraud.

MangoToupe 1y ago
There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  If Reddit create a material number of fake accounts and reported those as a key metric for fundraising, that would be fraud. I think the story has been exaggerated a lot, though. The original story was that the admins were doing real submission activity (links, etc.) but they had a mechanism to create a new user account with the submission. So they created a lot of new user accounts for themselves, but the activity was real and driven by the founders. We all have test accounts on our production systems. If it's a tiny number of the overall users at time of fundraising it doesn't matter. On the other hand if they created 10,000 accounts and then claimed they had 11,000 users that would be blatant fraud. I really don't think they did anything like that, though. I think they seeded the very initial site with content and made different "accounts" for it, but by the time they raised they had real traffic.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    ... and what if Twitter does it? Because at the very least they killed most countermeasures to bots and a serious percentage of activity on twitter is "fake engagement". I also have a much more difficult question: Could you explain how this fraud works/applies if nation states are the ones developing the bots? Is there a difference between foreign and US bots?

drewda 1y ago

"Do things that don't scale" to quote Sir PG.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]