Great products, bad companies: the trap no one talks about

Dan Borthwick, writing at SVPG, makes a point that cuts through the startup gospel: a company can ship something genuinely useful and still be rotten at the core. The product feels good. The founder sounds good on stage. The customers love it. And underneath, the company is exploiting workers, inflating valuations, or just plain lying about what it's building.

This isn't new. It's just hard to call out when you're sitting in the audience being fed the story.

The pattern shows up all the time. A founder raises a round, tells the press their mission is saving the world, and the product does something clever. Meanwhile, the same person is treating their team like a line item and their investors like ATMs. The product is real. The company is not.

Borthwick's point is practical: don't let a good product mask a bad company. Judge the business, not just the thing it sells. That's the kind of thinking most people in the industry skip. They see a useful tool and assume the company behind it is worth supporting.

This matters because we're surrounded by products that feel good to use and companies that don't deserve it. The hustle culture, the founder worship, the way we celebrate the shiny thing — it all makes the rot invisible. When you learn to separate the product from the company, you stop funding the wrong people. You stop being part of the confidence theater.

Why this matters for us: la gente out here building real businesses on thin margins don't need our money propping up founders who treat their workers like disposable inventory and their customers like targets.