A Postmortem of a Startup

Funding, privilege, and incentives

• Some argue the ability to raise a large pre-seed without a clear model reflects structural privilege; others counter that investors chase perceived likelihood of success, even if VCs are often wrong.
• There’s tension between “take the money if it’s offered” from a founder’s perspective and critiques that capital is being allocated on questionable signals like pedigree or hype.

Startup time horizons and motivation

• Multiple commenters stress you should be willing to work 7–10 years on a problem; quick exits are seen as rare or effectively failures that just return investor capital.
• Examples of well-known startups are cited as taking roughly a decade to meaningful liquidity, challenging the “fast exit” mindset.

Nature of the UK housing crisis

• Strong debate over whether planning permission is the main cause versus deeper political choices to constrain supply and support asset prices.
• NIMBYism is seen as globally common, but the UK’s dependence on housing wealth and high house-price growth make the issue more acute.
• Some emphasize immigration as a dominant short‑term demand driver; others highlight second homes, underused properties, and financialization of housing as assets.
• There’s discussion of land-value uplifts from planning permission and how artificial scarcity underpins high prices.

Can software fix a political/regulatory problem?

• Many think the startup was trying to attack a fundamentally political and social problem with a technical/business tool.
• Planning is framed as a domain of expertise, relationships, and incentives—not just forms and workflows—making pure software solutions limited.

Business model, value chain, and ego vs pragmatism

• A recurring critique: the founders didn’t fully grasp the value chain—how developers, landowners, and intermediaries actually make money—and misread incentives.
• Broader thread argues many startups are ego‑driven attempts at “disruption” in unfamiliar domains, instead of unglamorous but viable improvements to existing, bad software.

Postmortems, learning, and founder coaching

• The postmortem is praised as rare, honest, and educational, though a few question whether that energy should have gone into customer work.
• One coach describes a learning‑focused framework: repeatedly revisiting what’s been learned, what problem matters most now, and how to shorten the time between lesson and realization.
• Some feel the founders are too hard on themselves: using pre‑seed money to explore models, travel, and build brand is seen by others as normal experimentation, not obvious waste.