Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Secret Shuts Down

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 253 posts

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#111

Post by kzhahou »

abalone wrote: post #35

"Secret will hand its remaining cash back to investors" Minus the $6M the founders took off the table? If they keep it.. if ever there were a case for blacklisting founders, this is it. It is definitely NOT cool to pull a move like that. You want to cash out early a little because you've been boostrapping, ok, but if you then bail on the company and shut it down within a year, then you start to look like a fraud who…

I wonder if the non-founder employees that took cash off the table during that financing round, will get to keep it?

...oh, right, only founders get to do this. Everyone else (who had <1% equity to begin with) gets zilch.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#112

Post by prostoalex »

nostrademons wrote: post #98
prostoalex wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming there was full understanding that some of the money will go to founders, with usual arguments - "brings long-term focus", "takes care of day-to-day expenses", "encourages building for the long-term instead of flipping a company", etc. With that said, with Odeo, one thing that went down in history books is how Evan Williams graciously purchased the shares out of his personal fortune, thus making every inv…

The irony is that if Evan Williams had not bought back the shares and had instead started Twitter out of the same corporate entity, the investors would've done a whole lot better. Instead of breaking even, they'd be sitting on a few billion.

The way the story gets told in "Hatching Twitter" is that some of those investors (SV Angel is the one called out by name) said "Cool, we'll take the money back, but this is earmarked for your next project", which still got them into early TWTR.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#113

Post by CPLX »

nedwin wrote: post #6

This is going to be used as a case study of why not to let founders take cash off the table in early rounds for years to come.

This is hardly unprecedented, it has happened for oversubscribed companies that subsequently imploded multiple times in the last few years.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#114

Post by zaidf »

vonklaus wrote: post #107
tdaltonc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are totally wrong about these founders in particular and what taking money off of the table revels about founders generally. Most founders are extremely protective of their startup. It's their baby, and their livelihood. They'll do anything to keep it alive. Most "poor"( When you see a founder take a big chunk of cash from an early round, you shouldn't think, "they don't believe in what they're doing…

Well, maybe getting an early payout caused them to lose the hustle. They turned the engine off, handed the keys back to the investors and walked. It would have been harder to shut down the company if they saw 0 upside, and all their sweat equity evaporated.

You seem to suggest that shutting the company down was definitively a worse outcome for investors vs. keeping it going. It isn't that black and white. For example, if they kept the company going and spent the remaining millions and still failed(most common outcome), it is a worse outcome than shutting it down now and returning the millions.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#115

Post by fredfoobar42 »

denzil_correa wrote: post #83
fredfoobar42 wrote: post #71

Good, and good riddance. Anyone who invested in Secret is a fucking moron. You can't monetize anonymous messaging, and no established company would buy technology they could build in an afternoon hackathon for the cost of a couple cases of Red Bull. If you need proof, 4chan's run at a loss for over a decade. Any investor in a VC fund that invested in Secret should sue their fund for mismanagement of money.

> You can't monetize anonymous messaging I have always been curious about this part. What are the reasons you think one can not monetize anonymous messaging?

notahacker beat me to it, but how do you sell ads to an anonymous audience without compromizing the anonymity of the audience? You can't, unless you want to do cheap, dumb banner ads. They missed the chance to monetize up front by launching as a free app. Any investor who looked at this app and thought for more than ten seconds should have run screaming, or had security drag the founders out of the building. Or both.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#116

Post by nyamhap »

nostrademons wrote: post #72

This shutdown - and some of the comments here that indicate how nasty Secret had become before it died - is quite interesting in light of the conversation surrounding Google's Real Names Only policy. Secret cofounders David Byttow and Chris Bader-Wechseler were both veterans of Google+. Byttow, in particular, I recall being quite well-respected as someone who got shit done, quietly and efficiently, by the rest of the…

The reason 4chan works is that 4chan itself is very like-minded. Secret attracted too broad an audience and scared off the quality content creators as bad content started rising. Divergence of 'like-mindedness' among different social groups was just too large for one feed.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#117

Post by tdaltonc »

vonklaus wrote: post #107
tdaltonc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are totally wrong about these founders in particular and what taking money off of the table revels about founders generally. Most founders are extremely protective of their startup. It's their baby, and their livelihood. They'll do anything to keep it alive. Most "poor"( When you see a founder take a big chunk of cash from an early round, you shouldn't think, "they don't believe in what they're doing…

Well, maybe getting an early payout caused them to lose the hustle. They turned the engine off, handed the keys back to the investors and walked. It would have been harder to shut down the company if they saw 0 upside, and all their sweat equity evaporated.

I have no doubt that there are people who are demotivated by fuck-you-money in the bank. I also have no doubt that there are people who have their ambition liberated by it. Hopefully a good investor can tell the difference before they write the check.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#118

Post by sergiotapia »

nostrademons wrote: post #72

This shutdown - and some of the comments here that indicate how nasty Secret had become before it died - is quite interesting in light of the conversation surrounding Google's Real Names Only policy. Secret cofounders David Byttow and Chris Bader-Wechseler were both veterans of Google+. Byttow, in particular, I recall being quite well-respected as someone who got shit done, quietly and efficiently, by the rest of the…

4Chan is not going strong, in fact a large majority of their core users have migrated to 8Chan because of Moot's brainwashing by SJW.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#119

Post by ryandrake »

harryh wrote: post #79
ryandrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yea? I'll do it for $9M.

I'm certain that if you can build a product that generates a huge buzz and gets millions of people to sign up that you will have absolutely no trouble raising that kind of money. So go for it!

Ahh, but we're not talking about building the whole product and generating buzz, etc. We're talking about the stated purpose for raising $25M: "The funding will be used to implement two new features, a Facebook login and the ability to follow posts on a certain topic".

$25M.

For TWO features.

Hell, ignore my previous offer. I'd have given them a 92% discount and done that for a cool $2MM.

Post reply on HN