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Secret Shuts Down

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Re: Secret Shuts Down

#231

Post by Nemcue »

barrkel wrote: post #147
sethbannon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure it's wise to call G+ a "dead" social network. According to recent research by Pew, it's more popular than Twitter and just as popular as LinkedIn. http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/section-2-social-media-...

It's currently impossible to create a Youtube playlist without a G+ profile. Every time I want to create a new playlist, I create a new G+ profile, then delete it immediately afterwards. It is tedious. I'm sure many other people, when faced with roadblocks like these, create a do-nothing profile but don't bother deleting afterwards.

https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl

Just sayin'..

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#232

Post by abalone »

zaidf wrote: post #146
abalone wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, except for the $6M they kept for themselves. I'm the sort of founder that thinks it's my duty to return value to shareholders. I should make money when my investors make money. I would argue that is the only perspective that survives the long term in business. Riding hype waves to enrich one's self without producing real product, that's not sustainable. I know we're all founders here and would love to get t…

I'm the sort of founder that thinks it's my duty to return value to shareholders. You can be a founder that thinks it is your duty to return value to shareholders and still take money off the table. In fact, there are situations where not taking money off the table hurts your shareholders. Example: you're a poor founder with $400K in loans and 0 in saving, you're running a startup with good traction. You get a $20M a…

There's a difference between "not being super poor anymore" and taking a $6 million payday. Can you name a company where this hasn't resulted in disaster?

As Mark Suster put it, "Not FU money, but 'feed the family' money." What these guys got was FU money.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#233

Post by petercooper »

pjc50 wrote: post #216
petercooper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember so many people being so high on it when it launched, with several friends all raving about how fun/addicting it was, then just poof it disappeared from conversation. Pure speculation, but I think trolls/frauds took it over. I say this as a Secret troll myself. I knew the odds of the data (linked to my FB account) becoming public was too high to post real secrets, so I used to just experiment with what got…

Did it always have the FB login? Could that have been what killed it?

I could be wrong, but when I signed up (not early but around the time it first hit the headlines) I thought it was the only way to sign up, or at least the only useful way (since you needed friends and friends-of-friends to see secrets from).

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#234

Post by speby »

lnanek2 wrote: post #185
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…

Seems like a big success to me. The founders each took 3 million cash off the table on investment and now are closing up the company. Corporations are just a vehicle to make money after all, they got their pay day and ran.

There are almost certainly rules/stipulations around the money that was taken off the table by the founders in their funding round. It most certainly was tied to vested equity, at an absolute minimum, rather than granted as something such as a one-time bonus with no strings attached.

I would be surprised if the founders get to contractually retain the entire $3MM taken off the table in that funding round. It is possible that this is the case (and so maybe not so surprising) but given the often unique terms in startup funding, I would be surprised if this were the case here.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#235

Post by joshguthrie »

Ntrails wrote: post #229
rtpg wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/v/, /jp/, /pol/, and so many other boards are extremely toxic in behavior as well. There's some interesting stuff, but it's behind layers of "2edgy4u" behavior of people trying to out-insult each other.

I'd take goatse spam, arguments about hitler being a decent enough chap, and FYAD flames in that sort of environment over twitter where the threats seem real, because most of those sending don't seem to be in on the fact it is all a big joke . Maybe it's just me - but I think the irreverent self-aware toxicity has it's advantages.

I agree with this sentiment.

4chan's /b/ is seen as "the cesspool" and nobody tries to make it better because nobody wants it to be better. It just needs to be that place where the EMT that spent his day dealing with life and death can relieve his stress and let go of what's plaguing his mind with "lol, tits or gtfo"[1].

Because in the end, it's all a big joke.

1: Can't find back the exact screenshot were a /b/ user was saying this, sorry.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#236

Post by sshumaker »

lmm wrote: post #230
geojageojawg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they keep it.. if ever there were a case for blacklisting founders, this is it. Hell no to this horrific and toxic idea that we should blacklist anybody who sells equity and then fails. Can you please identify yourself, so we can all be well-informed that if we go into business with you, we're going into business with somebody who believes in the public shaming and blacklisting of those who take chances and fail…

Taking a chance and failing is one thing. But $6m is an absurd amount of money. That's never-work-again money (I'm not sure why they'd even mind being blacklisted). People in my neighbourhood would literally kill for less (and in a few tragic cases did).

Are you serious? After taxes that's maybe 1.8mm each. That's great, but certainly not never-work-again, especially in SF where the median one bedroom goes for 3300/month.

When doing FU calculations, you have to figure out how much you can earn from investing it, then factor in cost of living increases over the next 40 years.

Put it another way, if they invest and get 4% annually that's like earning a salary of 72k. Good luck living on that in SF with rent increases. (Starting salary for a new CS graduate at bigco in the Bay Area is like 105k).

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#237

Post by lmm »

sshumaker wrote: post #236
lmm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a chance and failing is one thing. But $6m is an absurd amount of money. That's never-work-again money (I'm not sure why they'd even mind being blacklisted). People in my neighbourhood would literally kill for less (and in a few tragic cases did).

Are you serious? After taxes that's maybe 1.8mm each. That's great, but certainly not never-work-again, especially in SF where the median one bedroom goes for 3300/month. When doing FU calculations, you have to figure out how much you can earn from investing it, then factor in cost of living increases over the next 40 years. Put it another way, if they invest and get 4% annually that's like earning a salary of 72k. G…

Maybe not in SF, but if you don't have to work again there's no need to live in SF. 72k/year is well above the median national salary; it's absolutely retirement-level money.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#238

Post by avn2109 »

abalone wrote: post #136
zaidf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. What do you mean "if they take it..."? It is their money. They gave away personal equity that was at the time worth $6M for the cash. 2. It is ridiculous to assume they pulled any move. Startups are a high risk gamble and the VCs who put money in them know it better than anyone else does. So they didn't pull a move on anyone. 3. Let's say a company raises $1M on a $3M valuation. Then in one year the valuation goes…

You're conflating valuation changes with cashing out. There's not problem, ethically, if a valuation swings rapidly either way. But cashing out ahead of a massive failure is a totally different move. That sort of thing in the public markets would prompt an SEC investigation for insider trading (despite it being "their money"). In the startup world it comes down to, these are not folks investors should be trusting.

But this isn't a publicly traded market, in fact it's just the opposite.

And the definition of "money off the table" is "keep it if things head south," so it's pretty hard to begrudge them for obeying the terms of the deal.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#239

Post by harryh »

blumkvist wrote: post #221
harryh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the actual purpose for the money. The purpose of the money was to grow the company. For a business < 1 year old it's impossible to predict what they'll need, so they just fill in the blank with some random sentence that no one cares about.

Excellent business practice!

It is actually.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#240

Post by avn2109 »

lmm wrote: post #230
geojageojawg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they keep it.. if ever there were a case for blacklisting founders, this is it. Hell no to this horrific and toxic idea that we should blacklist anybody who sells equity and then fails. Can you please identify yourself, so we can all be well-informed that if we go into business with you, we're going into business with somebody who believes in the public shaming and blacklisting of those who take chances and fail…

Taking a chance and failing is one thing. But $6m is an absurd amount of money. That's never-work-again money (I'm not sure why they'd even mind being blacklisted). People in my neighbourhood would literally kill for less (and in a few tragic cases did).

This is not even close to never-work-again money unless you want to live Cambodia or something. There is no portfolio in the world that gives a >75% chance of a safe, comfortable lifetime of first world retirement with that amount of pretax capital. We're not even in the ballpark.
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