[deleted]
Dear Mark Zuckerberg
191–200 of 272 posts
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#192Did you even talk price? It may have been worth your while...
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#193A fish rots from the head down. Zuckerberg has well-known form screwing over those he does business with. That you're surprised speaks more to your business acumen than his I'm afraid. Your open letter comes across as entitled and puerile - as they usually do.
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#194I don't get it. FB took an opportunity to make an acquisition offer (or at least open the dialog) and used some hard tactics (in this case the threat of direct competition) to improve their negotiating position. What's the problem here? This is just business. Facebook has every right to develop that app, just like Dalton Caldwell did. If it makes sense for them to do it themselves, then they will. If it makes sense f…
You and some other commenters seemed to have only read the "Facebook tried to acu-hire you" part. You're missing the point.
The important part of the post is the latter half, which is consistent with his recently blog posts about this thesis:
"My thesis is that if you purport to be a platform, your business model needs to reflect your platform-ness. Because if you instead have an ad business model, and you’re not making enough money, you can end up slaughtering your ecosystem." - Dalton http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/dalton-caldwell-on-app-nets...
This blog post is a continuation of that theme, wherein Facebook, a social media company platform, screwed with the user and 3rd party dev eco system[1] due to bad incentives[2] caused by a search for ad-revenue[3]. The paragraph here illustrates the connection:
[1] "Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. " - Dalton
[2] "I don’t think you or your employees are bad people. I just think you constructed a business that has financial motivations that are not in-line with users & developers." - Dalton
[3] "Strangely, your “platform developer relations” executive made no attempt to defend my position. Rather, he explained that he was recently given ownership of App Center, and that because of new ad units they were building, he was now responsible for over $1B/year in ad revenue. The execs in the room made clear that the success of my product would be an impediment to your ad revenue financial goals, and thus even offering me the chance to be acquired was a noble and kind move on their part." - Dalton
HN lately has been a lot of people picking out one part of the article, because it incenses some "sensibility" on their part, when it doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the OP, and the come back to HN to rant about it.
And poor Dalton tried real hard to be clear by linking to all the stuff he was referring to also.
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been seeing comments like the one you have responded to more and more here. Commenters seemingly confusing legality with ethics and politeness, or perhaps mistakenly thinking that the later two do not exist. If we swapped out companies with strangers and HN with facebook, would these people be responding to their friends posting venting comments about whistlers on the bus to work with "It's a free country, they…
> Why this is the case I can only guess. Because in contemporary North American culture the expectation for a company is basically sociopathic behavior within the law. But the expectation for an individual person is ethically aware and polite behavior in the face of public scrutiny.
Yes. Our business culture is rotten. I think it's a huge drag on our economy we don't criticize enough.
Too many people playing poker games instead of building a world where we all get better lives.
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#196I don't understand what you think Facebook did wrong. They intend to enter this new space, using their technology and their people. As a courtesy they offered to hire you / throw a lot of money at you. What would you have had them do instead? Not compete with you, because you're a precious snow flake? Acquire you and treat you like a prima donna, giving you your own team and allowing you to take your own technical di…
I don't get it either. Last week this guy wanted to make some sort of paid Open Twitter competitor. This week he's mad at Facebook for offering to acquire his company rather than simply build a first party feature! No good deed goes unpunished. Moreover, it's just not smart to publicly pick a fight with Facebook after they offered to acquire you. If you're the guys on the other side of the table, you might well brand…
This post is not about being acuhired at all. Read it again. His main thesis has been in the last couple of blog posts is:
Social media platforms should not be ad-supported.
This is just a continuation of that theme. He's saying, ~Your employees are doing asshole things to 3rd party developers, even though you're calling it a platform, because they have bad incentives, and that bad incentive is coming from the search for ad revenue~
Essentially, he's not so much mad at Mark, or even really caring whether Mark reads it or not. This is another piece of proof (to him and others that might listen), that social media platforms should not be ad-supported.
"The only way to get fulfillment is to help other people that believe what you believe." - Simon Sinek
You should watch the TED video where Simon Sinek talks about this. Dalton is basically putting this crazy idea out there about a non-ad supported social media platform (gasp!), and trying to find people who believes what he believes.
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#197I don't understand what you think Facebook did wrong. They intend to enter this new space, using their technology and their people. As a courtesy they offered to hire you / throw a lot of money at you. What would you have had them do instead? Not compete with you, because you're a precious snow flake? Acquire you and treat you like a prima donna, giving you your own team and allowing you to take your own technical di…
Would you please stop being gratuitously rude? Not compete with you, because you're a precious snow flake and Acquire you and treat you like a prima donna , etc. add nothing other than nastiness to Not compete with you and Acquire you , etc.
What, you can't see that calling someone a "snowflake" and a "prima Donna" is rude? You have a serious attitude problem!
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#198I don't understand what you think Facebook did wrong. They intend to enter this new space, using their technology and their people. As a courtesy they offered to hire you / throw a lot of money at you. What would you have had them do instead? Not compete with you, because you're a precious snow flake? Acquire you and treat you like a prima donna, giving you your own team and allowing you to take your own technical di…
Near the bottom of this page is this exchange:
natrius: "Did they threaten to revoke API access?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4325586)
dalton: "yep. That was presented as an option they could use by one exec, on a phone call." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4325593)
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#199I don't get it. FB took an opportunity to make an acquisition offer (or at least open the dialog) and used some hard tactics (in this case the threat of direct competition) to improve their negotiating position. What's the problem here? This is just business. Facebook has every right to develop that app, just like Dalton Caldwell did. If it makes sense for them to do it themselves, then they will. If it makes sense f…
You and some other commenters seemed to have only read the "Facebook tried to acu-hire you" part. You're missing the point. The important part of the post is the latter half, which is consistent with his recently blog posts about this thesis: "My thesis is that if you purport to be a platform, your business model needs to reflect your platform-ness. Because if you instead have an ad business model, and you’re not mak…
What do you say of my comment on Acqui-hires:
Re: Dear Mark Zuckerberg
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think his issue was that the meeting was in bad faith. Agreed, but an honest question [and I'm no fan of FB, but...]: how could FB have requested a meeting without acting in bad faith and without being dumb? Seems dumb for FB to say to Dalton: hey, we're about to launch a competitive product and, since you're going to be squashed, we wanted you to come in to talk about an aqui-hire. Now Dalton has inside-ish info…
They can tell him that they're interested in an aqui-hire before hand. That's how they can act in good faith. If he shows, he gets the info they gave him at the meeting anyway. If he doesn't, they crush him, which they plan to do now, after the meeting they had in bad faith.
What else would the meeting be for? He's incredibly naive if he honestly thought that the meeting was going to be them congratulating him for making a good product and nothing more.
I was hoping the outcome of this meeting would be executive-level support for my impending product launch.
What executive-level support would they give him except to buy him/his product? The bad faith here is going into this meeting with no intention of entertaining their obvious position.