The object is a good idea. The PR and selling around it isn't. Everything in the story belies the main claims of the article, and that's the only problem I see - the difference between hustle and reality.
This is exactly the ethos of move fast and break things that will make the right things happen. They shipped to real customers in real environments. They used technology to address problems. They iterated on the design. All just like you're supposed to do for any successful product.
Where they screwed up is claiming to "make the world a better place" before they really did it. They're still in product-market fit phase, not techbros save the world phase.
The step you left out is "pretend the existing industry doesn't exist and ignore hard-earned folk knowledge". A lot of these supposedly revolutionary ideas are wasting money learning things that e.g. agriculture or finance or whatever industry figured out ages ago.
> This is exactly the ethos of move fast and break things that will make the right things happen. They shipped to real customers in real environments.
Or, they wasted fuel, energy, manpower and hopes.
> They used technology to address problems.
Except they didn't, beyond noticing the problem exists.
> They iterated on the design.
Everyone does that.
> All just like you're supposed to do for any successful product.
The first rule for a successful product is, or at least should be, that it does something useful. The second, that it does it economically in context of available alternatives.
"Make the world a better place" is cringe-inducing, but reducing the message slightly is still bullshit marketing. For me, this already ruined any trust I had in the past in MIT ML, TED talks, and countless of startups "saving the world", "improving lives", etc.
(Also, a thing I learned from observation: if you want to improve the world, you probably don't want to take VC money.)
This is exactly the ethos of move fast and break things that will make the right things happen. They shipped to real customers in real environments. They used technology to address problems. They iterated on the design. All just like you're supposed to do for any successful product.
Where they screwed up is claiming to "make the world a better place" before they really did it. They're still in product-market fit phase, not techbros save the world phase.