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The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

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Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#91

Post by wpietri »

capkutay wrote: post #65
moocow01 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree but this is an unfortunately common behavior. During the dot-com boom many people picked up hugely expensive homes based upon the the perceived value of their shares. We all know how that turned out for most. Even now I hear of people buying homes way out of their means because they have some stock in the currently hot company of the week that has some assumed paper value.

How do you avoid these pitfalls? Just assume and act like you're still poor (or not rich) until you sell your stock?

Yes. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Investors recognize there's a problem there, so there's a trend these days to find ways for startup employees to cash out a bit.

That, however, applies mainly to later rounds. The YouSendIt guys made classic rookie mistakes. They mistook startups for a get-rich-quick scheme, but they aren't; median time to exit for a startup is 7 years from funding. And that's if you're lucky enough to exit at all.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#92

Post by wpietri »

j_hancock76 wrote: post #59
_sentient wrote: post #13

Did anyone else get the impression that this guy is a major slime ball? I'm sure YouSendIt has issues at the top, and it does sound like Kumaran may be a little glory hungry. But when you happily engage in vengeful DDOS attacks, shitty app spam, and flip apparently stolen websites, it paints a pretty clear picture of your character. I know I sure wouldn't want a guy like Shaikh working for me. Not in a million years.

"...and flip apparently stolen websites" Can someone explain this to me. I understand stealing a website's content but how do you steal a website?

One way is by transferring the domain. A famous case is sex.com. The original owner was awarded $65m (not sure if he got it all), but there was a legal battle more than a decade long:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#93

Post by harryh »

rdl wrote: post #89

1) Who the fuck were their lawyers? 2) This seems to be the inevitable consequence of third-tier investors, weird family politics, and founders with less than fully developed ethical sense (which is fine; I would expect young founders and first time founders especially to learn somewhat what things are considered ethical, starting from a personal moral framework -- that's what advisors, lawyers, investors, etc. are f…

Wow #4 is a really good question. Your examples from the past all sound a little bit like "people using tools that seemed at first like toys but turned out to be really important."

Your guesses for the future don't quite fit that description except maybe the cloud stuff, but that's actually gotten pretty mainstream. It might have been a good example from 5 years or so ago.

Thinking about it some the best thing I can come up with is interpreted/dynamically typed programming languages. It pains me to say this though because I kind of believe in my core that compiled/strongly typed languages are the way to go for large projects. But maybe that's just me holding on to the past? I'm not sure.

Really really good question.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#94

Post by temphn »

jacquesm wrote: post #35
jakejake wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article pretty much states that it was likely a mistake to take that much funding when they had no idea how much they needed (or if they even needed funding). It seems like there is this messed up idea that a successful startup is when you get a ton of funding, the founders cash out and then who cares if company goes down the toilet (well, except the investors of course). I suppose that is successful in the sense…

Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. They won't be as obscenely rich but several million is definitely nothing strange (Euros or Dollars, pick your poison). VC's won't touch such businesses (and they shouldn't) because the return rate is not worth the hassle for them but that is just a matter of perspective. For founders the life style businesses are typically a sa…

> Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots.

Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data? It just seems implausible to me, given that the moonshot companies tend to employ a lot more people. Yes, relatively few companies become "big deals", but those companies (Adobe, MS, Google, Facebook, Apple) are the ones that actually employ most of the people in the industry.

Aside from 37Signals, what lifestyle businesses are (a) less stressful and (b) more lucrative than a shoot-for-the-moon startup? If it's a technology business, it's something that will be obsolesced rapidly unless you keep moving (e.g Yousendit being obsolesced by Dropbox), so where's the "lifestyle" in that?

It seems that your best options are either (a) join a startup or (b) work for a large company. The no man's land in between seems to be the highest stress and worst returns, with no prospect of your ship ever really coming in.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#95

Post by temphn »

rdl wrote: post #89

1) Who the fuck were their lawyers? 2) This seems to be the inevitable consequence of third-tier investors, weird family politics, and founders with less than fully developed ethical sense (which is fine; I would expect young founders and first time founders especially to learn somewhat what things are considered ethical, starting from a personal moral framework -- that's what advisors, lawyers, investors, etc. are f…

> what is the current unfair advantage held by anyone competent

I hate to say it given how much time we waste here, but it's probably reading Hacker News. People here know about node.js, about client-side MVC frameworks, about MongoDB/NoSQL, and the like. Some of those things we even think of as old hat, from way back in 2010 or 2011. Some of them we think of as trendy and without staying power.

But we actually did take the time to look at these technologies, evaluate them, and reject them -- or sometimes, accept them.

Now think about the guys who still think Java is the standard, who might just now be getting around to learning Ruby...all when Ruby is itself fast becoming Blub and the new hotness is actually node + coffeescript (or a more FP language like Haskell/Clojure/Scala).

That's exactly the equivalent of the guys who ran Windows because they just didn't know any better. For better or for worse, competent hackers read Hacker News.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#97

Post by adaml_623 »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #16
bryanlarsen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full article is close to 100 paragraphs. Putting that all on one page would intimidate and lose a bunch of readers. Even choosing to put 15-20 paragraphs on a single page makes it a "wall of text" that will put off many readers. Of course, the real problem is the short attention span of the Internet age but it's hard to fault them for trying to avoid scaring off users.

The only reason to post the article on multiple pages is to expose readers to more ads.

I think that's a valid reason don't you?

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#98

Post by adaml_623 »

justjimmy wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full article is close to 100 paragraphs. Putting that all on one page would intimidate and lose a bunch of readers. Even choosing to put 15-20 paragraphs on a single page makes it a "wall of text" that will put off many readers. Of course, the real problem is the short attention span of the Internet age but it's hard to fault them for trying to avoid scaring off users.

Someone should split test this :D Half view the pagination version, half view the 1 page version – and see % of the users that actually finish the article.

Wrong metric. They should care about the number of ads viewed and the click through rate. And the amount of viral sharing and facebook likes and that kind of stuff. They aren't a charity remember.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#99

Post by dasil003 »

ahoyhere wrote: post #83
dasil003 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making an actual business with actual profit is different than what everyone calls a "startup" these days. You don't have to work your ass off. And yet it shouldn't be, because profit-driven tech businesses can still be scalable and have many of the advantages of true "startups". It's still much closer to a "startup" than it is to a brick and mortar operation. On the flip side, people seeking viral growth probably…

I agree with you that they shouldn't be in conflict. There are only a few outliers (FB) where they truly are, and the chance any one of us has of creating the next one of those are so tiny as to be nonexistent. When I write about "startups" (with quotes), I am writing a reflection of what most people (at least people who write, talk, and comment) believe. :) Not what I believe ought to be.

I wasn't disagreeing with you either, just reframing from the perspective of a "startup" guy.
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