[ztratar]

"It would have been different if we had been debating which plan among several to implement or how to shore up specific weaknesses, but we had nothing."

I don't really understand "having nothing" -- you're either creating value or you're not. You guys spotted a real problem, but your v1 solution was meh. There were certainly multiple ways out (and not just tack on gamification), and even if some were long-shots, the uniqueness of a startup is to place those bets.

[santoshalper]

I think he just doesn't agree that there were multiple ways out. He seems to believe that they exhausted options and couldn't figure out a path.

[williamstein]

He assumed that if he personally couldn't solve a problem in a few weeks of hard work, then nobody coudl. This is kind of naive or possibly arrogant. It also sounds weak to me, coming from academic research, in which people work very hard on problems for years, and sometimes even succeed at solving those problems (famous example: Fermat's Last Theorem).

[dwwoelfel]

He explicitly says in the post that he's not claiming the problem is unsolvable. If I read it right, he even thinks it is possible that he could solve it, but he doesn't want to bet a year of his life on it.