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Equally as trashy and sick as Bumfights, the sort of thing that might happen in the early scenes of a documentary exposing the rise and fall of another fraudulent startup. I'm sure he'll be in the 30 under 30 soon.
Rich people using their financial prowess to subjugate others who are in a much weaker position in order to let them engage in unhinged behavior for their amusement and benefit.
> We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven’t been done before. This is a very annoying line. Risk for the sake of risk is self-destructive. The risk-reward profile is what matters, and people respect risk taking with large upside. Having your company’s logo tattooed on a bunch of random people is zero or negative upside.
Tattooing company logos has already been done https://www.huffpost.com/entry/billy-gibby-aka-hostgator_n_2... So really, they are just boring and derivative. Probably an analog to be drawn here for modern SV.
The first, in 1999-2001, was a bit more subtle. There was a general trend for small, colourful corporate logo tattoos, almost cyberpunk-inspired - think airlines, pizzas, soft drinks. Dot coms with VC-inflated marketing budgets jumped on the back of that, which inevitably ended with those companies being amongst the first to implode when the bubble burst. Discussed as a new form of the Bladerunner Curse on forums like Fucked Company.
The second, in 2006-2008, was the opposite - big, crude, prominently displayed blatant cash grabs. Porn, online casinos, domain squatting registrars, 2nd rate auction sites, e-gold style finance scams. Heavily publicised, but far fewer people actually did it. Died off in the Great Financial Crisis.
A small sample size, but it does seem to be a harbinger of an imminent economic crisis...
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If you're advertising that you're going to permanently mark your almost certainly transient brand on desperate people for the promise of just an interview, I think it's fair to wonder what you'd prefer to keep hidden. In your case it's all puppies and rainbows, but presumably your public face is also quite a bit milder than, "Sure get the tattoo and maybe I'll see if you can make it to the next round of interviews, h…
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https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_i8446...
As a person covered in tattoos, my greatest fear here would be if the company rebranded.
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What purpose is that? Are you claiming they aren't looking to hire people, and just want their company name out there for other purposes? Or that having this story somehow helps their actual hiring goals (e.g. by dissuading people who think that this is awful from applying, or that it will actually make people want to apply)? I can think of several purposes someone might claim that this has. All of them seem pretty d…
any publicity is more than a no name startup would usually get. stunts like these are often primarily for publicity.
If the actual argument is "I'm fairly confident that the founders of this startup believe that the publicity from this will be more beneficial than harmful", that seems like a defensible but arguable view, and I would find it interesting to dig more into the assumptions around that. Is it based solely on expectations of how the founders would think, or on how the general perception of other people in the industry (job applicants, potential investors, etc.) tend to view things like this? Or even a more broad statement about human psychology (e.g. society as a whole ends up acting in ways that benefit actors who are well-known even if it's not for good reasons)?
Maybe I'm too naive or not smart enough to know what everyone else thinks about this, but none of this seems particularly obvious to me! I would expect a lot of people to have very different views on all of it, and those types of discussions are among the type that I come to HN for.
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any publicity is more than a no name startup would usually get. stunts like these are often primarily for publicity.
Yeah, I was asking about what the actual goal of that publicity was, because I still don't think it's obvious. My point was that I don't understand what the parent commenter was assuming the actual thing they were trying to get out of it was; it seems just as plausible that bad publicity would hurt their ability to recruit/fundraise/make sales in the future as it would to help them. Even if you personally believe tha…
In a different market with a serious business where long term reputation matters, maybe bad publicity could be a factor. But this startup is likely to go under within a year and the founder will shed it like a skin and move on it it does. So they don't have a strong reason to care about negative press if any (and I still think this article is probably worth the cost of one tattoo artist for them).
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Yeah, I was asking about what the actual goal of that publicity was, because I still don't think it's obvious. My point was that I don't understand what the parent commenter was assuming the actual thing they were trying to get out of it was; it seems just as plausible that bad publicity would hurt their ability to recruit/fundraise/make sales in the future as it would to help them. Even if you personally believe tha…
In my view start up founders are definitely the type to view all publicity as good publicity, especially because they really need attention to get further funding. You see a ton of ai start ups with provocative advertising or billboards like "never hire humans" for similar reasons, right? In a different market with a serious business where long term reputation matters, maybe bad publicity could be a factor. But this…
I've never seen this, but I don't live in the Bay Area, so maybe I'm just out of the loop. All of this is useful context though, and the type of thing I was looking for when I asked!