In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.
So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.
People try to summarize their thoughts, but if they are not good at it the summary ends up being "We're pretty cool, not like those other non-cool people, and we stand for good things". And then, having arrived at that thought, they express it using the words they have heard before in similar circumstances.
And boom - pretentious mediocracy seasoned with hollow platitudes!
"We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers
I'm going to start a business selling a quantum leap in synergy paradigms. Begin with the tagline, move on to a landing page, and after that's nicely done, get a group of people together to brainstorm what the company actually does.
Salesman: "We provide win-win situations and customer-focused solutions."
Dilbert: "But, what is the product or service that you actually sell?"
Salesman: "We don't sell, we partner."
After that all they care about is getting you to agree that the demo looks good.
After that all they care about is getting you to agree that this product could be somehow useful in your company
Then they pounce. They ask when you are going to sign the contract because if you don't do it ASAP you will lose the discount. If you try to say that you don't want it, they start with the guilt trip. "I thought we had a deal. I have already booked my trip to come see you next week."
Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.
I feel bad shitting on a startup, but reading their docs I'm struggling to see what value they add beyond abstracting S3 and Akamai.
"Arent there other companies working on fraud on the blockchain? How are you different?"
"Our team is amazing and is made up of myself and my founder who have 3-4 years of experience and need to fill it with 8+ year experienced engineers because before then no one is really useful here."
Me: "..."
OR
"Do we really need another machine learning solution to classify documents? What is different from you and your competitors?"
"Well, we think everyone else is doing it wrong and that we've found the perfect solution."
"What is that?"
"Myself and my cofounder are far smarter than any of our competitors".
OR
"How do you talk to candidates about salary?"
"Well, we don't give any actual numbers, but we share our compensation philosophy doc, which ive linked here".
"Right, but can you afford these people? why do you expect them to take a huge pay cut to make you a millionaire?"
"The right person will have faith"
There's always an answer that feels like it was fed to them by a VC who knows it won't really work, but is just hoping and praying.
But I also have a lesson from my former decades on earth: if lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, there is probably something you don't know. So could it be that there is some reason all these startups are so maddeningly obtuse? Other than just being bad at communication, I mean? Is there some incentive to not actually say what you do?
Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just supposed to look nice and welcoming.
This makes sense to me. You generally don't see uninformative homepages from consumer software-as-a-service or direct-to-consumer companies, for instance. Airbnb and Airtable both seem to immediately explain in fairly clear terms what they do, for example.
Even massive software companies with a huge range of products that self-serve to business customers have pretty explanatory homepages. Salesforce is a decent example.
I think the home pages that get these sorts of complaints are either companies that don't have product-market fit (and thus don't even know what they are yet), or companies that have long involved sales processes with large enterprise clients where they probably tend to negotiate highly-customized services. An example of the latter that comes to mind is Splunk, whose website uses a lot of buzz words and seems to basically be saying "trust us, if you're a big company with a lot of data, we can do anything you need regarding your data."
I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what?
I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question.
Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.
Because you are asking a meaningless question. Firstly, they are no experts on their competitors. Secondly, how can anyone even be, unless they have used all of them for a long time? Who can do that comparison??
