#startup-lessons — Public Fediverse posts

Teams that deeply understand their costs, performance, and systems make faster, better decisions. https://hackernoon.com/operational-intelligence-the-real-moat-in-venture-backed-startups #startuplessons

🚀 So #MIT wunderkinds thought they'd revolutionize coding with an overpriced #AI #editor. Fast forward three years, and the $29B "Cursor" has cursorily vanished like a Snapchat message. 📉 Lesson learned: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. 😂
https://www.permissionprotocol.com/blog/cursor-is-dead.html #Innovation #TechFail #StartupLessons #HackerNews #ngated

Kanwal Rekhi, widely regarded as the Father of Indo-US Entrepreneurship, speaks to Mathrubhumi about failure, resilience, and building ventures for the long term. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/money/kanwal-rekhi-indus-entrepreneurship-groundbreaker-iitgn-np9b2vfd?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #KanwalRekhi #Entrepreneurship #StartupLessons #Leadership

💥 When your CTO joins the Competition?

Mesolitica’s bold pivot with “Future is Solo” exposes the harsh realities of the AI market, and the lessons are brutal but invaluable.

If you’re in tech, leadership, or AI, this is a must-read. It challenges assumptions about talent, competition, and strategy in a world where the AI race waits for no one. That's a good piece of article by @iqbalabd (Iqbal Abdullah)

👉 Read here: https://kafkai.ai/articles/ai-small-business/ai-market-reality-future-is-solo-pivot/

#AI #Leadership #TechStrategy #StartupLessons #Innovation LaLoka Labs

Was It Really a Billion Dollar Mistake?

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/01/02/was-it-really-a-billion-dollar-mistake/

#HackerNews #BillionDollarMistake #BusinessMistakes #StartupLessons #FinancialAnalysis #DecisionMaking

What I learned: Success and failure happen simultaneously. You can win at life while losing at business. The trick is knowing which one matters when you look back.

Still building. Still learning. Still figuring it out.

#BuildInPublic #IndieHacker #Fatherhood #ProductDevelopment #StartupLessons

3/3

Discover how to scale a VR startup globally, cut hardware costs, and build sustainable models for small businesses. https://hackernoon.com/making-vr-accessible-lessons-from-scaling-a-startup-to-a-global-network #startuplessons

AI: Explainable Enough

They look really juicy, she said. I was sitting in a small room with a faint chemical smell, doing one my first customer interviews. There is a sweet spot between going too deep and asserting a position. Good AI has to be just explainable enough to satisfy the user without overwhelming them with information. Luckily, I wasn’t new to the problem. 

Coming from a microscopy and bio background with a strong inclination towards image analysis I had picked up deep learning as a way to be lazy in lab. Why bother figuring out features of interest when you can have a computer do it for you, was my angle. The issue was that in 2015 no biologist would accept any kind of deep learning analysis and definitely not if you couldn’t explain the details. 

What the domain expert user doesn’t want:
– How a convolutional neural network works. Confidence scores, loss, AUC, are all meaningless to a biologist and also to a doctor. 

What the domain expert desires: 
– Help at the lowest level of detail that they care about. 
– AI identifies features A, B, C, and that when you see A, B, & C it is likely to be disease X. 

Most users don’t care how a deep learning really works. So, if you start giving them details like the IoU score of the object detection bounding box or if it was YOLO or R-CNN that you used their eyes will glaze over and you will never get a customer. Draw a bounding box, heat map, or outline, with the predicted label and stop there. It’s also bad to go to the other extreme. If the AI just states the diagnosis for the whole image then the AI might be right, but the user does not get to participate in the process. Not to mention regulatory risk goes way up.

This applies beyong images, consider LLMs. No one with any expertise likes a black box. Today, why do LLMs generate code instead of directly doing the thing that the programmer is asking them to do? It’s because the programmer wants to ensure that the code “works” and they have the expertise to figure out if and when it goes wrong. It’s the same reason that vibe coding is great for prototyping but not for production and why frequent readers can spot AI patterns, ahem,  easily.  So in a Betty Crocker cake mix kind of way, let the user add the egg. 

Building explainable-enough AI takes immense effort. It actually is easier to train AI to diagnose the whole image or to give details. Generating high-quality data at that just right level is very difficult and expensive. However, do it right and the effort pays off. The outcome is an AI-Human causal prediction machine. Where the causes, i.e. the median level features, inform the user and build confidence towards the final outcome. The deep learning part is still a black box but the user doesn’t mind because you aid their thinking. 

I’m excited by some new developments like REX which sort of retro-fit causality onto usual deep learning models. With improvements in performance user preferences for detail may change, but I suspect that need for AI to be explainable enough will remain. Perhaps we will even have custom labels like ‘juicy’.

#AI #AIAdoption #AICommunication #AIExplainability #AIForDoctors #AIInHealthcare #AIInTheWild #AIProductDesign #AIUX #artificialIntelligence #BettyCrockerThinking #BiomedicalAI #Business #CausalAI #DataProductDesign #DeepLearning #ExplainableAI #HumanAIInteraction #ImageAnalysis #LLMs #MachineLearning #StartupLessons #statistics #TechMetaphors #techPhilosophy #TrustInAI #UserCenteredAI #XAI

Hear Isaac Tay offer his thoughts on what great product management would look like https://youtube.com/shorts/DsY6PaSYiKY

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@analyseasia/video/7383509837298076945?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7198703856800581122
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#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons

Hear Isaac Tay discuss the seven essential skills which a product manager must have #productmanagement https://youtube.com/shorts/sXIOO877hrE

Main Site: https://www.analyse.asia/product-management-in-a-scale-up-standup-comedy-with-isaac-tay/
Full YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/grpLz3Z9erQ
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#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons

Our job as product managers is to deliver the right group of users - Isaac Tay via @isaacttsg https://youtube.com/shorts/whTBmw75bbU

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@analyseasia/video/7380633452065901840?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7198703856800581122

Main Site: https://www.analyse.asia/product-management-in-a-scale-up-standup-comedy-with-isaac-tay/
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#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons

There is no one mathematical formula in product management - Isaac Tay aka @isaacttsg https://youtube.com/shorts/6LenthFtw8Y

Main Site: https://www.analyse.asia/product-management-in-a-scale-up-standup-comedy-with-isaac-tay/
Full YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/grpLz3Z9erQ
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#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons

Hear Isaac Tay explain why his former startup, Honestbee had a playbook for market expansion but did not execute well https://youtube.com/shorts/vWEJLAtLmCY

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@analyseasia/video/7380606042775899393?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7198703856800581122
Main Site: https://www.analyse.asia/product-management-in-a-scale-up-standup-comedy-with-isaac-tay/
Full YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/grpLz3Z9erQ
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#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons

Hear Isaac Tay aka @isaacttsg explain why his former startup, Honestbee failed due to rapidly diversifying into many businesses without having one dominant one https://youtube.com/shorts/kZ1Bp3oBNhY

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@analyseasia/video/7380605239306554640?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7198703856800581122
Main Site: https://www.analyse.asia/product-management-in-a-scale-up-standup-comedy-with-isaac-tay/
Full YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/grpLz3Z9erQ
Newsletter Signup: https://www.analyse.asia/#/portal/signup
LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/analyse-asia/

#productmanagement #productmanager #southeastasia #scaleup #teammanagement #startuplessons