There is no Jake Frink

Edit: it looks like Jiggity (aka Jong-Moon Kim, Warp Prism's creator) has gone and posted a lot more details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/im6r4/there_is_no...

If he's come forward and put all the details on the record, I feel comfortable putting a lot more details here, along with my own commentary on the whole mess.

Jiggity was indeed a co-founder of Teevox, which was in last summer's YC batch. He and Andrew were one always one of the most energetic, technically impressive, and just fun-to-be-around founders in the batch. Seriously, one of the bright spots of weekly dinners was always the corner of the orange room where the Teevox demo was set up each week, greeting passerby with equal parts cheeriness from the founders and magic from the slick Hulu demo.

Which is why it was so heartbreaking when Teevox was one of the first startups in YC S10 to die. It was a sober reminder to everyone that coming up with a clever product just isn't always enough, and we're all in a low-success-rate business.

In any case, Teevox is gone. Dead. Kaput. No longer there. Corporate entity unraveled. It happens to startups. People who spend time here should know that, even though the reddit posters cluelessly assume that Teevox lives on with a team of coders and a "slick marketing team".

Andrew went back to school but Jiggity decided to keep on plugging away at some side projects. One of them turned into Warp Prism. I think that this is fucking awesome. In fact, it's pretty much the classic startup feel-good turnaround story: smart hacker down on his luck, has a startup shut down and fail, keeps on hacking away and eventually stumbles upon something people love to use. He keeps on iterating on the product, out0executing a similar competitor all by himself. (one of the posters in the linked thread said s/he was always suspicious that WarpPrism could ever have been built by one person!) Awesome! This is the classic inspirational never-give-up narrative in action.

Except in this case, some moron hiding behind an anonymous pseudonym does a simple whois search, discovers that the domain is registered to the same guy who happend to found a startup the year before and - gasp - concludes that s/he's unearthed the scandal of a century! WarpPrism can't be the work of a lone hacker, it must have a whole "slick marketing team" behind it! Angry reddit mob, enter stage left!

I do not know why Jiggity chose the name "Jake Frink". (In retrospect, isn't that um, sort of obviously a pseudonym?) I do know that Jiggity has previously used various aliases in everyday conversation, and rarely his real name. But the reality is, aside from that one name, every other detail of the original story is true.

Why was everyone so quick to rush to judgement? Is it a reflexive distrust of anything that might be backed by a company? Is it a predisposition to believe in a made-up but apparently widely perceived trend that, in the words of another poster, "the newer YC bunch are playing dirty to win"?

In any case, this time it makes me upset. It's one thing if people mis-read a boilerplate line in the Dropbox ToS and decide to get angry over that; Dropbox is doing well and will be fine, internet mob or not. But this is different. This is not a large successful company, it's just a friend who has bravely marched straight through the hell that every startup founder has nightmares about. but the one that is never far from my mind when it's racing late at night - the idea that all your hard work will eventually evaporate.

I went through that period once when my first startup died four years ago, and it put me into a rather severe months-long depression. Thankfully my current startup is doing quite well, but the memory of what happened before and the gnawing fear it could happen again is never far from my consciousness late at night when my mind is racing and I have trouble falling asleep. I think pretty much every founder feels the same way all the way until (at least) the liquidity event. It's a special kind of overbearing stress that only other founders can truly understand.

Jiggity pushed right through that, and created a kickass product people loved using. The three months after my first startup died I spent mostly half-heartedly applying for jobs and walking around the streets of Palo Alto in sort of a daze; Jiggity spent that time single-handedly creating the best way to watch StarCraft 2 games in the world. And when those users find out, that gasp, the creator of the product they love so much was using a pseudonym - this is how they react.

I advise everyone who reads Hacker News and is thinking of one day starting a company to think of Jiggity's story as inspirational, and the reaction to it as a warning. In the end though, despite the fact that I was moved to post this long rant, I know he'll get through it just fine. He's thrived after going through much worse.

What question do you think he gets asked in every job interview? If your answer was "Do you even speak English?", you win a gold star.

Hideyuki recently got his first name legally changed to Frank. Whammo. No more awkward questions.

I would further note that there is at least one person widely respected on HN who does business under a name which is not their birth name, specifically to avoid pervasive problems with this issue in our industry. (His story is not mine to tell.) The practice is also endemic in journalism, acting, etc etc etc.

It probably isn't the only issue: Redditors are nortoriously anti-capitalist, too, so it's much more convenient to be a community-minded hobbyist developer than to be a corporation (gasp!) with investors (gasp!) and hundreds of thousands of dollars (gasp!).

P.S. If race is totally not an issue, it would be a wee bit instructive that people get so pissed of when someone pretends to be a white guy.

Next thing you'll be telling me there is no Satoshi Nakamoto!

There'll always be an Alan Smithee, though, right?

This has to do with lying to the community about your story, playing up the good parts and running under a false narrative for no good reason. As pointed out in the linked thread, a competitor to Teevox, WellPlayed.tv has been completely transparent about the fact that it's a company that runs it, not some unemployed dude fantasy, it lists the exact users who represent it, and doesn't do things like violate Paypal TOS and solicit donations under a false name for a corporation. Also, this is not OSS Teevox is peddling here. They were actively receiving funds for profit and nothing was Open Source about it in the least.