Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:08 JST JA Westenberg

   There’s a lie we tell creative people.

   He was the archetype: MIT dropout, whiteboard-brained, caffeine-sculpted. Lived in a Hacker House with ten other founders, all splitting rent and ramen. 🧵

   • Embed this notice
     JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:07 JST JA Westenberg

     in reply to

     The investor nodded politely, then said, “So… it makes hiring easier?” He said yes, then immediately started talking about vector embeddings.

     The investor passed. So did the next one. And the one after that.

   • Embed this notice
     JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:07 JST JA Westenberg

     in reply to

     A year later, a recruiter launched something similar. Same core idea, worse tech. No behavioral science. No AI. Just a flashy UI and a loud mouth. He was closing deals within weeks. Eventually raised $5 million. I checked his website last month: it’s ugly, but profitable.

     Minoru Saba repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:07 JST JA Westenberg

     in reply to

     There’s a lie we tell talented people: that craft wins. That mastery speaks for itself. That building something great is enough. That a good product will find its audience.

     It won’t.

   • Embed this notice
     JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:08 JST JA Westenberg

     in reply to

     He had built something objectively impressive and 5 years ahead of its time: a tool that could scrape résumés / analyze behavioral patterns

   • Embed this notice
     JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 11:54:08 JST JA Westenberg

     in reply to

     I watched him pitch it to a local investor over coffee. He spoke in full paragraphs about machine learning weights, predictive accuracy, and latent talent indexes.