[chillingeffect]

As an east coaster the MIT startup hypothesis tracks very well. It's not just MIT but most startups out here i've been involved with. They're generally moonshots of tech, "guaranteed" to sell bc you have to buy bc the tech is superior. :)

Since following HN years back i've been trying to speak up at these companies with ideas like building a brand, market test-fit, etc and been given the cold stare. Thanks to this article I now see it's cultural. Typically these founders have relevant experience in their field, so they "know" there's a fit without testing and prefer to remain in stealth mode until the big reveal.

[jprete]

Marketing, sales, market testing, and doing what customers want are inherently messy processes. I think people who spend too much time immersed in purely technical work start to think that messy processes are inherently wrong, because there are no definitive right answers.

Probably the best thing to do would be, at the university level, to give engineers more business experience and marketing/sales types more concrete-problem experience. But that would be vocational, and I think universities systematically dislike seeing their work as vocational training.