Heroku: Sounds nice but impossible to deliver. Even if you do, no one is going to trust their business to your startup's platform.
Dropbox: Yet another backup solution that is going nowhere.
AirBnb: Have fun building a marketplace. Chicken and egg problems are impossible to solve.
I have learned to not trust my instincts. Now I tell startups, "Sounds cool, but why are you at a tech event? You should be at an event for fashion/teachers/bar owners/tour guides/whoever your customer is. Why are you clowning around seeking reassurance from from other programmers?"
After living here long enough I'm no longer trying to judge, it's just the way things are, and I just learned to translate. That's why I made the graphs.
I think it's only irrelevant if you understand this difference of translation and adapt to it.
Not everybody understands it though, specially when you first move here or when you first have contact with the US. I know it took me a non trivial amount of time to realize it.
I won't address the relative merits of different cultural norms on being supportive vs being brutally honest.
As you pointed out, the main issue here is that founders are counting on other people so much for validation of their ideas (and staking their egos on it). I don't see why you wouldn't just give your honest initial impression. If the founders become discouraged or upset with you for doing so, then that's their problem and not yours.
I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing. I am genuinely perplexed at how monumentally bad outcomes can be produced by a series of rational choices.
The best I figure is the following. I gain my "wisdom" by making mistakes and trying to learn from them. The problem is that the environment from a year ago is quite different from that today. Heck, every passing second yields an environment different from the past. And sometimes (always?), it is the external factors that make the big difference.
Let me illustrate a case in point. When I first saw MIDP/CLDC on a Motorola IDEN phone, I knew this was the future. I spent a lot of time making something of it. Yet, the market wasn't ready (and frankly, neither was the technology). In 2003-2004, I saw .net compact framework on a Compaq iPaq. I was so amazed by the technology that I again spent a lot of resources making something of it. In those days, you'd have to put a bulky sleeve on your iPaq in order to get wifi. Cellular data? Forget about it ... it cost a fortune and the carriers were determined to milk their monopoly to the max. When the iPhone was announced in 2007, I saw it and dismissed it. And it wasn't just me. I was in grad school and had worked in the cell phone industry. Pretty much every smart person I knew told me this was yet another non-event. We all know what happened next to the people who wrote software for the iPhone in the early days.
When I reflect upon this and other similar experiences, I can't help but think that my hard-earned wisdom may have become obsolete without my knowing it. These days I subscribe to a different sage advice that might work better ... "Stay hungry, stay foolish"[1].
[1]: From the last issue of the Whole Earth catalogue as relayed via Steve Jobs in his Stanford commencement speech.
Not in the context of other people (specifically non-Americans) trying to understand feedback. I find I can say something to an American that is "fantastic!" only to be told by a German "that it would never work". It just emphasises the need to get feedback from multiple avenues, ideally from people who have different world-views. Your example reactions to the three startups backs this point up.
But I suppose that's why I have Dropbox account #314...
Did you wait until they had 313 accounts before you signed up, or was it by random chance?
So recently I've been training myself to talk roses when dealing with American's. :)
I get the impression they think I've just spat in their faces. :)
I think I could have a top-tier international corporation and still have to force myself to describe my product or service as great. I'd probably try to qualify it as opinion - "Well, I think it's pretty good."
In that colloquial context, it means, "total assent/acknowledgement with what you've proposed or reported", rather than a quality evaluation.
If aimed at a more concrete bit of work output, 'great' is more likely to be a superlative quality evaluation.
For example:
Q: "What about this general logo theme for exploration?" [a proposed abstract direction/plan]
A: "Great!" [means, I agree that's worth pursuing, let's see where it goes]
Q: "I've made this logo treatment."
A: "Great!" [Somewhat vague; definitely means I'm glad we've reached this point (regardless of the treatment quality), but might (if directly gesturing at the object) also imply some evaluative approval]
Q: "How would you rate logo treatment #2?"
A: "Great!" [this finally really means it's evaluated as great on the relevant scale]
Even 'excellent', 'fantastic', and other adjectives are often used this same way: casually used to signal sufficient approval, when describing something prospectively/abstractly/directionally, but only being strong signals of judgement when applied to specific, concrete, completed instances.
Having spent some time on both coasts I'd say its not necessarily an "American" thing, its more a "Californian" thing. Here in NYC, I'm learning that negative feedback is pretty common and often encouraged.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+log+normal+distrib...
Additionally, I always hear the line "it's a good start" as an acknowledgement that the person sees some potential in the idea, but that it needs a lot of work to achieve said potential. In fact, I can't remember a time that I have heard "it's a good start" by itself in a sentence. It is usually accompanied by a ", but ...", and I think the person behind the idea would know that this is coming, as he/she should know that there is still a lot of work that can be done.
Especially once you start to notice they don't quite mean it but just like "being part" of the conversation by drowning it out in praises, to hear their own voice, which is natural, and all very sweet and positive, but it's not very constructive.
It might seem motivating at first, the praise to urge the other guy to continue like that, but at some point it becomes laziness, because you're not adding anything to the conversation or thinking for yourself, just going "yeah yeah great awesome!" and you're not being useful at all, anymore.
It's kind of a bit like what Douglas Adams said, "if their mouths stop moving, their brains might start working".
But I think you left off the one, international word for "totally fucking awesome I don't care where you come from":
WOW
If anyone says wow, you know you've got a hit.
(Don't know how to rewrite the above to remove the traces of sarcasm. It's just an observation, I'm not trying to depreciate the OP)
Downvote well deserved :)
Most people I talk to about our business are fairly realistic about the challenges we face, or progress thus far, etc.
