Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?
Maybe we shouldn’t be casting stones from the HN glass house, because literally every other startup here has a mission statement that sounds as ridiculous as this
They shouldn't but they do. Making the world a better place is not what founders have in mind. What they have in mind is "we are looking for an exit and retire young", for nearly all of them. Unfortunately those words are not something they can write in a mission statement so they must be creative.
Not just startups, this cognitive dissonance is everywhere in business and we're supposed to just swallow it. Honestly I've been a cynical prick for most of my adult life and for a while I played along with it but it just does not align with my values and keeping up the pretense is draining.
I mean uh. Come work for us / hire us, we're the best at what we do! Honest! AI!
Unrealistic goals seem to be a core tenet of capitalist realism. You see the same thing in politics: Trump is going to stop the Ukraine war in one day, Musk is going to cut 2 trillion from the US budget with efficiency improvements, etc... . A couple of years ago my company gave OKRs a go. One of the principles is that objectives should be practically impossible to reach, i.e. if you hit 100% of an objective then it wasn't ambitious enough. It's a surefire way to ramp up anxiety and stress on a team.
The C-Suite coming up with this garbage is in every industry. You notice it more with tech companies on HN because that's the industry we usually focus on
Mission statements have the main function of obscuring that. It is safe to assume that the more obfuscating a mission statement is, the most likely the business goal is to steal investors' monies while finding another fool to buy the whole operation, ideally someone from the FAANG crew.
That's the great thing with such an ambiguous statement is that they can pivot at any point without having say they are pivoting. They are in a position to do what ever it is that someone inquires
Five weeks in any major corporation outside of IT, and you will be spewing that kind of talk like a machine gun. It's mind-numbing. Avoid the suits as if they were spreaders of the plague, because their brain-rot is not much better.
I don't know which planet you live on, but London's public transit is hellish on days where it works. The fact that there seems to be industrial action every other week, that the subway is slowly heating up, and major stations are virtually always overcrowded is not something I even take into consideration. Not when the local trains have a toss-of-a-coin chance of actually showing up at all, or even in a configuration that was originally planned, and not just half of the carriages.
I unironically had better public transit in third-world countries.
Certainly not my experience of London transport. I get a combination of trains, tubes and busses most days. I also grew up in rural England so I know what shitty transport is really like.
It always amuses me when people respond with some completely unrelated personal hobby horse like this. There’s nothing at all in my comment in any way related to driving or congestion fees, not even if you squint a whole lot, and no way in which this comment ties into anything at all I said, even if I squint a whole lot.
I’m not sure the comment fields are considered by media organizations or public figures… like, at all. I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic. I don’t think anyone with a shred of influence or responsibility in western society reads them.
> I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic.
There are two quite different possible interpretations for that fact pattern.
For an article like this, the negative comments would be aimed at the people in the article, not the journalist. So the article can be a great (muckraking) article, and the comments might also be vitriolic, and everything is good if the rage is well-aimed.
