There are some parallels between your critique of this startup and what educators critique about ed tech startups. Mainly that the tech comes first and the context that tech is supposed to be nested in is unacknowledged, leading to failure or other issues. I’ve been starting to wonder if incubators and CS programs need to teach units on founder humility, domain context, and social context so we stop wasting so much cash on reinventing wheels.
It's a human problem, not a technologist problem. I've often been asked by a business manager to create a website or other software in support of a new business process that is still in what I'd call the hypothesis testing phase. I encourage them to create content for it, first, and if they take my advice, half the time they realize the process won't have enough throughput to justify it.
Funnily enough, having humility is one of the best ways to remain teachable and perhaps one of the fastest ways to grow and continue to have a growth mindset
I consider 'reinventing wheels' to be a valuable educational experience, I often wonder about how could educational 'enterprises' (universities, and education companies?) leverage this to improve what they do, but then I remember that it doesn't matter what I think, just what I do, and I sure do not work for any such companies.
But it's kind of silly that "we" (as a society) are spending 300k USD to teach some of this "obvious" things to some random group of well connected americans.
then again, the dollar is made up so long as 'the future' pays back these money-creation loans we may as well spend the money this way. the alternative is going back to corporate backed research, instead of this strange contemporary VC-backed research
Reinventing wheels is good, ignoring any kind of domain knowledge/expertise is not.
If you’re running into problems that someone with a year or less experience in the area can point out and you don’t have good reason to do different then that’s incompetence not ingenuity.
Humility is the key trait that many CS grads are lacking. Personally, I attribute it to the explosion of CS popularity since ~2010. Most bio majors are still nerds (and I assume the same is true for education), whereas I think a minority of CS grads these days are motivated by passion and curiosity.
