A startup founder struggles with what’s next after a period of slow growth:
“It was late on a gloomy Saturday afternoon in Mountain View, and we were doing a walk’n’talk ‘office hours’ session with Paul Graham – ‘PG’ – on the street outside the Y Combinator office.
“‘What do you have to show for the funding you’ve taken so far?’
“I tried to explain. ‘We felt we needed to build our own technology platform for flight search, because nothing already existed to support the product we were trying to build. So, basically we spent it on back-end engineering.’
“‘Well that sure was a mistake,’ he huffed.
“‘How do you know your product is something people want?’ The pg-bot had engaged.
“It was hard to explain.”