121–130 of 135 posts
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If the team were worth that much, then they would have made Loopt astoundingly profitable in the last 7 years, and we'd all be using it. Judge people on their success/failure. Not on what other people think of them. Loopt was a flawed, quickly obsoleted idea. That was pretty obvious from the outset.
Note to blasterford: it looks like your subsequent comments after this one are [dead], possibly due to repeated flagging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the team were worth that much, then they would have made Loopt astoundingly profitable in the last 7 years, and we'd all be using it. Judge people on their success/failure. Not on what other people think of them. Loopt was a flawed, quickly obsoleted idea. That was pretty obvious from the outset.
Note to blasterford: it looks like your subsequent comments after this one are [dead], possibly due to repeated flagging.
Well done! Censorship at its best.
Hacker news used to be good. What the hell happened.
Be careful what you say on HN. If it goes against the agenda of YC or is critical of past YC funded companies, you'll be banned.
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You're essentially saying that trying to do Loopt at all was a mistake and we just should have done something else. Everyone seems to forget that before iPhone, and later Android, you had no choice but to partner with carriers - there was no other way to distribute your application. Even in Europe, where the phone ecosystem is different, access to location required carrier support, and nearly no handsets had the abil…
No man. I am not saying Loopt was a mistake. I reiterate that the exclusivity with the carriers was a mistake. I was in the UK 2008-2010 and you could only get Loopt through American carriers. BTW, far back early 2000s, you could get mobile software from getjar.
It took all our effort on both the business and engineering side to do what we did. And then iPhone came out, the world changed quickly, and in retrospect, we were reluctant and missed some opportunities. I would play that part and things after differently if I had another chance - but nothing before.
Things were more complicated then. I could go into boring details, but here's one example - MapKit on iPhone wasn't released until mid May in 2009. We had to maintain our own tile generation and geocoding infrastructure even after that for non-iPhones.
In the end though, international availability didn't matter because the product didn't resonate the way it needed to. Users in the US who weren't using it weren't simply waiting for their foreign friends to join. International availability would have brought more users, yes, but not success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the team were worth that much, then they would have made Loopt astoundingly profitable in the last 7 years, and we'd all be using it. Judge people on their success/failure. Not on what other people think of them. Loopt was a flawed, quickly obsoleted idea. That was pretty obvious from the outset.
Note to blasterford: it looks like your subsequent comments after this one are [dead], possibly due to repeated flagging.
blasterford2 2 hours ago | link [dead]
Thanks hackernews for silently banning my account for posting a couple of non-abusive, pretty well backed up opinions.
Well done! Censorship at its best.
Hacker news used to be good. What the hell happened.
Be careful what you say on HN. If it goes against the agenda of YC or is critical of past YC funded companies, you'll be banned.
I think it's just that the anti-spam/anti-troll algorithms have become very sensitive to flagging and/or downvotes. I think I heard that greater weight is given to flags and downvotes by highly respected users (the list of which which is probably also algorithmically determined). Some of those weighted users are bound to be human and (over)react to criticism of their friends-of-friends' companies with flags or downvotes.
An example: a while ago I reluctantly clicked "flag" on a comment that really didn't belong, to the extent of warranting more than a downvote (which I also do incredibly rarely). I must have been among the flags+votes that pushed the comment over some algorithmic threshold, as the comment immediately became [dead]. Your second account, created for this comment, probably met the same fate due to the comment's reactionary nature.
I know what it feels like to worry about being cut off from a community. A few weeks ago I read about another account that got auto-killed, and the user didn't figure it out for quite a long time. I ran a couple of tests on my account to see if I was "slow banned" and accidentally scared myself by not realizing that the HN delay setting has an upper bound of 10m. My delay setting was 20m, so it took me a couple of days to figure out why my posts started out [dead] for 10m. I eventually found the original thread where pg explained the delay setting, the only place where the 10m max delay is mentioned, and realized what was going on.
I do agree that some topics on HN elicit more downvoting and flagging than they should. I ardently avoid commenting on any Apple-related articles, for example. Most of the risky topics can still be addressed by wording one's comments more carefully, but sometimes even the most insightful comment will be met with downvotes.
I used to get my intellectual discussion fix from the Off Topic thread on Groklaw. I discovered Hacker News when someone posted a link to YCombinator and slowly became converted. I finally left Groklaw when I realized that it achieved its S/N ratio in large measure by aggressive human intervention and moderation (and... getting face-slapped by Peter H. Salus, who had (has?) a lot of sway on Groklaw, certainly helped my decision to leave). I'm a technology lover to the core, so I'll take HN's touchy human-guided anti-spam algorithms over a 100% human-driven system any day.
I haven't found any place quite like Hacker News. It's not quite as nice as it was when I first joined (back then the existing HN regulars joined forces to fill the front page with articles about esoteric programming languages like Erlang to drive away a recent influx of new traffic, of which I was a part -- those articles convinced me to stay). However, the comment quality on most of the articles I read still exceeds anything I've found anywhere else. Try reading a comment thread on Ars Technica, for example -- full of trolls, shills, and overreactions.
I'm in no way connected to HN or YC, apart from unsuccessfully applying to YC quite a while ago. I've just sort of taken it upon myself to find [dead] accounts that I don't think deserve to be so and post comments like this one. As such I hope you'll give HN another chance (adjust your commenting strategy, and maybe try e-mailing someone at YC about your existing account -- tracking down such an e-mail address is left as an exercise for the reader). [I also hope I'm not upsetting pg or the YC alumni who serve as moderators by posting these comments - please say so if you'd like me to stop]
In case anyone is missing what has happened here, this is why people hate on private equity/VC. As far as I can tell, Loopt wasn't doing very well. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=loopt.com&cmpt=... They had an attempt to revive the company to compete with Groupon last year that many here thought was stupid and died an early death ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2696412 ) Michael Moritz (Sequoia partne…
Now if we ask ourselves if Loopt was not a Sequoia company, would Green Dot have paid that much money for Loopt's people and technology. They could of easy got a better deal somewhere else.
However I think Sequoia needed to save face on Loopt. They needed to make sure it had an successful exit. The more successful company's in Sequoia portfolio the more investors are willing to invest in them right?
[1]http://www.quora.com/Green-Dot-company/Why-did-Sequoia-inves...
I don't know why PG is trying to hype this up. I see ycombinator becoming more and more like a old boys network.
If your doing a startup don't get discouraged. The reason you should be doing it in the first place is cause you truely believe in the product and the business and not looking to flip your startup for quick cash.
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The people "hating" (I haven't seen anyone hate, merely question) are frustrated because everybody around them tells them it's not luck, it's awesome, and that if you build a great product, get popular, etc., your day will come. That it's a meritocracy, as one commenter put it. But it's not. This sale demonstrates that. It's a good time to adjust expectations and decide what, exactly, it is in your best interest to b…
But wait a second, weren't you stating a few days ago that lifestyle companies make people more rich than moonshots: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3647026 Please note: I say this as someone who has great respect for the look, feel, and polish of Freckle and your other work. My disagreement in that thread was purely about the empirical question of whether lifestyle business are better than moonshots in terms of…
Not sure why you thought I might have changed my mind based on the above. Misreading perhaps? I wasn't PERSONALLY expressing any of the sentiments in my comment above. I was echoing what I see & hear from people who do care about acquisitions.
My position is, and has been for years, that the VC game is way more of a game of chance than a game of skill. (Unless you think it's a skill to have friends who can bail out your failing startup with an acquisition. It might be. But it's sure not the skill everybody promotes.) A game that, in a lot of ways, reduces your potential for self-determination. That's why I'm such a tireless promoter of bacon busines (http://baconbiz.com).
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* ready to sell business because it wasn't going anywhere, sequoia knew greendot well and got them to get a return on the $ put in so it wasn't a total buss. Hence the huge (relative to the sale) incentive for founders to stick around since they got nothing from the sale. is my guess.
Not sure if you figured this out, but sama = Sam Altman = ceo of Loopt. I think sama's words on this situation carry a little more weight than your guess.
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Not sure if you figured this out, but sama = Sam Altman = ceo of Loopt. I think sama's words on this situation carry a little more weight than your guess.
Oh - so he's going to tell the truth then? I guarantee he has confidentiality agreements about all of that - so I don't believe anything he says for a second. Loopt was a total bust for VC returns.
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I'm not seeing where GP indicates they don't realize that VCs' loyalty to their buddies can easily bring them in profit in the long term.
Loyalty to their buddies only brings the VCs profit in the long term if their buddies are good, which is exactly the point of webwright's that underwater is trying to contradict.
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No man. I am not saying Loopt was a mistake. I reiterate that the exclusivity with the carriers was a mistake. I was in the UK 2008-2010 and you could only get Loopt through American carriers. BTW, far back early 2000s, you could get mobile software from getjar.
Ah, but the difference between exclusivity and these deals taking longer than the average lifespan can't be discerned optically - I assure you that in the early days we were never for any reasonable length of time in a position to offer more than we did. It took all our effort on both the business and engineering side to do what we did. And then iPhone came out, the world changed quickly, and in retrospect, we were r…
From outside,it was obvious what was wrong. From outside,it always is.