And for everyone one of those I can find about a thousand HN comments telling you to push on even if you're unsure about whether you can deliver.

Edit: For that reason, most of this "I told you so" sounds like hindsight bias if it comes from someone who would normally take the attitude of "fake it till you make it", "don't wait until you're sure you have a working product".

Look at my comments on the April thread.

I was incredibly sceptical about a 19 year old with no experience starting a biotech company. All of my comments had a large number of upvotes (for 2015), while many of the people disagreeing with me were downvoted into the negatives.

Yes, being skeptical about a 19 year old is easy.

The hard part is to do it in a way consistent with the rhetoric about “fake it till you make it”/“it’ll all work out”/“all self doubt is impostor syndrome”.

It's not hard if you just don't tell people to fake it till they make it in the first place.

There's a sizeable contingent on HN that is sceptical of that mindset in general, which was my point.

No. There's a sizeable contingent of people who will call out specific ideas as being "obviously BS", but who lack the insight to realize the dissonance with their mentality of "fake it till you make it". People who actually have a general answer for "when not to fake it, and give up instead" are the extreme exception.

Generally that advice is not directed towards people starting medical device companies.

If you can find even one such comment that also offers a heuristic for when your self-doubt is justified and you should therefore quit, I will be surprised.