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Coffee shop chat with a VC that shook my thinking about AI local startups
I was at Figure 8 Coffee last Tuesday and ended up talking to this VC from ATX Seed Ventures. He said most Austin AI startups are just wrapping APIs and calling it innovation, and that local investors are getting tired of it. He told me straight up that if your product doesn't solve a real Austin problem like traffic or housing, you're wasting everyone's time. It hit different because I've been pitching my own AI side project and realized I'm guilty of the same thing. Has anyone else had a conversation that made you totally rethink your business angle?
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emma_flores1mo agoTop Commenter
I see this everywhere now. People are building stuff for the sake of building stuff, not because it actually helps anyone. It reminds me of all the food delivery apps that popped up a few years back, just copying each other and burning cash. Same thing with AI now, everyone is throwing GPT wrappers at problems that don't exist. I live on the east side and take the bus every day, so I'd actually kill for an app that tells me when my route is going to be late or rerouted. Instead I get fifteen different chatbots that can write me a poem about tacos. That VC was right about one thing, if you don't know what people are actually complaining about, you're just making noise.
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Honestly, reading this made me stop because I used to think any AI project was cool no matter what it did. But that VC has a point. I was working on an AI tool that summarized news articles and thought it was brilliant, but then I realized nobody in Austin actually asked for that. It was just me building something because I could, not because anyone needed it. This whole conversation has me looking at my own work differently now.
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west.richard1mo ago
Figure 8 Coffee is solid but man, I gotta push back a little on this. Not every startup has to solve traffic or housing to be worth building, that VC sounds like he's been in too many board meetings lol. I think @taylorshah is onto something about building stuff nobody asked for, but sometimes people just build things for fun or to learn, and that's okay too. The whole "solve a real Austin problem" thing feels like a shortcut to overthinking it, not every good idea comes from a city complaint. Plenty of useful tools started as "stupid" side projects that just happened to find an audience later.
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