Classic narcissistic personality disorder. Run for the hills. With NPDs, it is always everybody else's fault. Add pathological lying, some bipolar, and maybe just for fun booze/drugs and they'll drive you insane too.
where do you pick bipolar from?
A horrifying startup accelerator story
111–120 of 146 posts
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#112Classic narcissistic personality disorder. Run for the hills. With NPDs, it is always everybody else's fault. Add pathological lying, some bipolar, and maybe just for fun booze/drugs and they'll drive you insane too.
To me it feels much more BPD than NPD. Which is not a good thing!
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#113I'd just like to say that the reason I created Seed-DB ( http://www.seed-db.com ) is because the world of seed accelerators should be more transparent. I've currently got a list of 170+ accelerators around the world, and the list makes it pretty clear which ones get results and which don't. (Or don't care enough about publicizing results). If you have any feedback for me as to what would be useful to you when choosin…
Very cool. Have you thought about adding a feature for people to review their accelerators?
I'd like to make it easier for founders to "claim" their startup on Seed-DB, which would lead to the ability for them to privately rate their accelerator and their VCs/Angels if they've received funding.
I'm not sure how many startups would do that, though... it's surprising to me how many startups from accelerators don't even have a Crunchbase or an Angellist page. Seed-DB is a nights/weekends project for me and I've already got a backlog of stuff I want to add. :)
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#114This story is really frustrating and sad to hear, but I have to say, in the three years I've been working on my startup, never once has anything good happened from paying for access to any type of person (investors or customers), using any currency (equity or cash). We did YCombinator, which could be described as an "access" play, but apart from that, every time someone has offered us access to something in return fo…
Paying someone for access never ends well. Do you think the people whose access is being sold are happy with the arrangement? By definition you're entering into a sleazy area. This is why apartment brokers selling access to apartments are sleazy.
Probably not in the US, but keep in mind that very often in many other places, what the person selling access is also doing is screening for the person whose access is being sold.
This sort of arrangement works pretty well if the person selling the access is actually offering a decent service to both sides. However, it needs to be mutual, pre-arranged, and with plenty of duties all around (in most of the world "duties" end up meaning "kickbacks" but the system won't work if it is limited to that).
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for writing this up. > They agree to pay for flights so long as we pay for our own hotels and car rental. This seems crazy to me. In my head, if a few hundred bucks for flights & lodging is too much to ask, how much dough could they really have to invest? Is this standard? > It's a convertible note with pretty standard terms, fully signed by all the partners. We sign and send it back. [...] He explains that th…
The other thing to keep in mind is that the accelerators work something like this: 1) Fund a bunch of companies with the expectation that maybe 1 in 10 will succeed. 2) When the other 9 fail, you have a bunch of talented developers all in one place. And guess what? The really successful company is hiring. It's pretty brilliant, if not Machiavellian.
A bunch of talented developers who all want to run their own show. I'm not sure they'd make great employees for a small slice of equity even after their startup's failed.
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to harp on the pedantic point, but your parent's point still stands: you said you never once paid for access, when in fact you seem to have exactly once paid for access, which is different. The point that paying for access makes sense only if it is through YCombinator may be a good one but it's a significantly weaker one than you were originally making. Instead of an unequivocal "no", you're saying "no, but..."…
to be a pedant to your point, OP never actually said he "never once paid for access"... he said "never once has anything good happened from paying for access". they're semantically different.
Gah, this is an awful pointless pedantry battle but I can't help it - OP said that, and also said that YC was something good, and YC is a program wherein you pay for (in part) access.
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be a pedant to your point, OP never actually said he "never once paid for access"... he said "never once has anything good happened from paying for access". they're semantically different.
Gah, this is an awful pointless pedantry battle but I can't help it - OP said that, and also said that YC was something good, and YC is a program wherein you pay for (in part) access.
Maybe he paid for the part that wasn't access? Did you think of that? :)
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#118Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#119Design tip: if a quote is a quote, have a quote style. If a quote is the entire content of your article and is many paragraphs long, rethink styling it as a quote and instead label it, or something.
When Ctrl-A makes the text more readable it's an indictment upon the designer.
In Firefox, I often use View/Page Style/No Style, in such cases.
Re: A horrifying startup accelerator story
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for writing this up. > They agree to pay for flights so long as we pay for our own hotels and car rental. This seems crazy to me. In my head, if a few hundred bucks for flights & lodging is too much to ask, how much dough could they really have to invest? Is this standard? > It's a convertible note with pretty standard terms, fully signed by all the partners. We sign and send it back. [...] He explains that th…
> until cash is in the bank I don't change my life. if you're in sales, this is EXTREMELY important, doubly so if you sell for a startup. the deal isn't real until the money shows up. customers will take advantage of your kindness, lie to you, manipulate you, appeal to your vanity, and they can smell desperation from a mile away. "give an inch and they'll take a mile" - these folksy old timey sayings don't come from…
This is an important lesson, but it's not an absolute rule.
You need to have a sense for your customers, how much power they have over the money, and how much they'll suffer if you're inflexible.
I've spent years working with teachers, who (as patio11 will tell you) are not a great target market for ready cash, but who are very honest. I used to have an informal policy where a teacher would just tell me they were working on getting a purchase order, and I'd credit their subscription. I changed that to only crediting them a month at a time (after one situation where I realized towards the end of the year that one PO had never arrived.. it was stressful for the teacher, but all resolved amicably), but still, there's trust involved.
If I didn't trust them, a lot of these teachers would just be stuck without access for weeks -- the site would be far less useful to them.
- Edit: "until the cash is in the bank, don't change your life" still applies in my situation; payment was slow and unreliable (though paid in the long run), and that does affect planning.