This happens a lot when working on hard problems. People have different understandings of where things are, how they used to be, what was encountered, what was overcome, what remains, who is working on what, how likely they are to succeed, how long it will take, what comes after that, and when it will be useful in a particular case. Newcomers have fresh energy and naive expectations, the old guard has endurance and knowledge but is jaded by lingering issues.

The trouble is when people who understand the situation lose hope that progress will be made. Their criticisms are public and genuine, but the understanding that similar problems have been encountered and overcome isn't part of them. This turns away the newcomers who see impassable obstacles, and they go off to attempt a different solution that drains energy from the original attempt, but eventually ends up running into other, similar issues.

The best approach seems to be to openly acknowledge the criticisms, and invite people to be part of the solution. Acknowledging your current flaws is harder when you have shiny, confident marketing, but easier when your brand is a weird, trippy, animated cube.

Embrace the weird and build the hard things. No one is bothered that Apple came from blue boxing, or that Google's original servers sat in Lego racks. Haters gonna hate, but history doesn't remember them...

Hack the Planet