I agree with this take. I respect Zora for shipping through the noise.
Not specific to Zora, but more a general cultural phenomenon I observe is that in the startup ecosystem founders tend to conform to and uphold a tremendously optimistic and positive outlook for their companies' futures. This is generally a good thing and I very much appreciate it.
However, I think this builds misleading impressions for their respective users and audiences. Because these founders expect their users to be empathic to their self-overcoming ethic. Founders will always force/encourage themselves to think as if any problem is just a challenge to overcome. Founders can appreciate other founders to pivot a lot because they see it as inspiration. They think that they too can just hustle harder to achieve their goal. But users don't think that way unless these users are all founders too.
When founders finally publicly announce sweeping changes to the public, users tend to react very critically. This is because users were left with the illusion that the current version of the startup's product was going great and that it had staying power.
On the other hand, I do think that founders are somewhat victims of the users' moods too.
While building Kiwi, I have shared my mood quite a lot, for example when it was very hard to keep building Kiwi News. And at times I had gotten the impression that this inverse loser-posting lead to my audience losing their conviction in me as a founder and therefore their conviction for using my product. It feels like I shouldn't have done that. And it feels as if projecting confidence while staying transparent about uncertainty is really the only way to go for founders in this environment. So I don't blame either group.
