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YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

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Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#61

Post by _delirium »

tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

That was my read also, that the CEO realized that she may have screwed up, and therefore the situation called for her to stop talking and let someone more familiar with contract law decide what she had or hadn't already agreed to, before digging more holes. That doesn't necessarily mean that legal@ is actually going to refuse to pay the invoice, though I can see how you could interpret it as an unfriendly hint that they may be looking closely at whether they really have to do so. Forwarding it to something called finance@ instead for the same decision is an interesting PR suggestion, since it suggests merely bureaucracy rather than opposition, even if it amounts to the same.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#63

Post by kika »

_delirium wrote: post #19

I'm going to go out on a limb and register a slight discomfort with the increasing use of HN as a "court of public opinion" in very fact-bound disputes like this one. I can sort of see resorting to it out of desperation, but I'm afraid the Internet Lynch Mob has a very high ratio of outrage to effort spent actually investigating. This post has 84 upvotes in 21 minutes, which suggests a very quick investigation! So, t…

Upvotes are not hollowpoints. They are blanks, just making noise "Hey, look! Something might be wrong here!"

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#64

Post by taskstrike »

One key point is that YC is a great brand in the tech community. If you are a YC graduate, your have the credibility of it behind you as if someone was a Harvard grad. Doing stuff like this erodes the brand for an trivial amount of money.

Work was done here, and if they weren't a YC company and some other guy, it is less likely that a designer would work for them without some kind of written agreement.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#65

Post by smackfu »

consultutah wrote: post #15

The op has, hopefully, learned a valuable lesson: don't work without a signed contract. That said, the comp should have just paid or, at very least, tried to negotiate the amount thought I don't think that's worth the effort either. This is such a paltry amount as to not be worth the effort to fight.

The other lesson people may take away is don't do contract work for startups.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#66

Post by kika »

Silhouette wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

Surely the lesson for start-up CEOs is even simpler: you are responsible for everything in your organisation. Like most here, I wouldn't have let myself get into the position of this freelance designer or chosen to air my dirty laundry in public. On the other hand, if I had sent a legitimate invoice and a CEO tried to fob me off with the kind of attitude claimed here (he says, noting that we haven't heard the other s…

Especially you're responsible for what you say in the email.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#67

Post by brudgers »

tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

I don't see having legal council review the invoice as a cost effective strategy.

At worst the invoice is for less than $2000 (3 days at top rate). No attorney can just make it go away for less than the cost of paying the invoice.

What should happen is that the attorney will say to pay it, and send their own invoice on top of it.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#68

Post by kategleason »

kennywinker wrote: post #52
soup10 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that screen looks like 5 hours work, max. Summoning an internet lynch mob over a dispute like that is incredibly unprofessional.

Sure. 5 hours @ somewhere between $67-20/hour* is $337-$100. Since the post doesn't mention a specific amount, we have no way of knowing if their bill was for more or less... all we can guess is it was > $100 (three $'s used when blanking the price). * http://www.howdesign.com/design-business/pricing/hourly-rate...

$780.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#70

Post by jmharvey »

There's a lesson here on the other side, as well: when you're hiring any kind of contractor (designer, lawyer, etc.) you need to specify not just an hourly rate, but also an estimated number of hours. One person's idea of "getting started" on a project may be an hour or two of work, another's may be several dozen hours. Getting an invoice for many times what you thought you were agreeing to is an unpleasant shock, regardless of how it's resolved.
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