Why Synthetic Data Fails

Key Takeaways

One of the things I've always hated about Silicon Valley is that you see so many people raising for the sake of raising. Like I think one of the things that I often see is that a lot of founders that I know, they don't have some big dream of building a product that solves some idea that they really believe in. If you talk to a bunch of YC founders or whoever it is, what is their goal? It really is to tell all their friends that they raised $10 million and to show their parents they got a headline on Techrunch. Like that is their goal. And so they spend all their time tweeting and they go to these VC dinners and it's all just so that they can show the world that they raised a big amount of money. And so I think raising immediately always felt silly to me. Like everybody's default is to just immediately raise. But if you were to think about it from first principles, like if you didn't know how Silicon Valley worked, if you didn't know that raising was a thing, like why would you do that? Your first instinct should be to go out and build whatever you're dreaming of. And sure, if you ever run into financial problems, then sure, think about raising money then, but don't waste all this effort and time up front when you don't even know what you do with it.