[Whodi]

Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

It's an unfortunate fact about any creative industry that a person with clout can completely put the brakes on an promising idea just because it doesn't fit neatly into their worldview. This reminds me of the story when Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pitched Bat out of Hell to CBS. Clive Davis, the executive, says "Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know how to write a song. Have you ever listened to pop music?"

Hurtful. But even though this guy was a pretty successful A&R person, he wasn't clairvoyant, as the album was a huge hit. It's unfortunate that it demoralized their team instead of serving as bulletin board motivation material.

[sidman]

> Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

Thats the sentence that got me too. It shouldn't be personal and that was very personal. Harsh comments about the idea, the technology used, the implementation, the design or even the presentation is acceptable but to say no one gives a shit about your team is almost like being racist (in the startup world).

I say this because it seems that the judge was making a judgement on someone simply because they might not have had any rockstar engineers or might not (up to this date) done anything of note, which really doesn't mean anything, simply judging the book by its cover without even willing to read the summary at the back.

[oillio]

As you said, this is true for any creative community. The most hard core and painful critiques I have ever seen came at a university architecture design show. Ask any theatre performer what they think about the critics.

Do you think the experts at the time thought the Apple computer was very good, or that personal computers in general would be anything more than a toy?

Grow a thick skin, or don't listen to "experts". You won't be around long otherwise.

[tubbo]

Clive Davis was a piece of shit. But he was a successful piece of shit, so nobody realizes that he's actually a piece of shit. Everyone thinks he's Brian Epstein, but he's really no better than Suge Knight, if you want to make analogies. He takes what he believes are "great images" and puts his own cookie-cutter formulaic music behind it. Fake, fake, fake.

Just like these "judges" of the startup industry. Fuck them.

[Whodi]

Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)

[_quasimodo]

you actually can blow shit up in minecraft, and its fun too ;)