[dsacco]

> Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business."

I'm a (successful) entrepreneur and I don't call any businesses "tie shop businesses." In a quick search, I can't even find a reference to that terminology. That's a pretty condescending label, whether you mean it to be or not. The polite way to make your point is to talk about how certain businesses are designed to scale up rapidly while others are designed to be profitable with steady growth. Ideally, you'd make this point while considering the tradeoffs of each and acknowledging that advice about each is going to be different. Hopefully you'd make this point 1) where it's actually relevant, and 2) without reducing all the considerable effort involved in building and maintaining any kind of business to selling ties.

In any case, it's not accurate as stated. What you're saying is a false dichotomy. Not all companies designed to scale with venture capital are legitimately developing novel technology. In fact, having spoken to many of Y Combinator's founders directly, I would say most of them aren't, and many actually have well-defined markets with which to sell their products. Most "tech startups" are something closer to the application of existing technology than they are to the development of new technology. In contrast, a machine learning consulting firm can absolutely be developing new technology, and it can absolutely have difficulty finding product-market fit.

That distinction doesn't matter much, because both sorts of businesses can encounter significant difficulties, and both types encounter difficulties not subsumed by the other. Most importantly, most users active on Hacker News have yet to build any business. The author of this post didn't specify what sort of company they were looking for advice about. Your "advice" seems utterly misplaced and discouraging.