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How startups should die

blog.42floors.com

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61–70 of 72 posts

Re: How startups should die

#61

Post by pjgomez »

brd wrote: post #7

Absolutely yes to "Pass the Hacker News test". Seneca's letter Epistle XI is one of my favorites and teaches this exact lesson. It closes with "Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them." http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#‘XI1 I've found it to be a great technique for making better decis…

I agree, it reminds me about a quote I heared sometime ago (I can't remember where) about corporate (mis)management and its paper trail, and it was something like "Before you send an email, imagine it printed in the front page of the New York Times".

Re: How startups should die

#62

Post by pratik661 »

taroth wrote: post #49
brd wrote: post #7

Absolutely yes to "Pass the Hacker News test". Seneca's letter Epistle XI is one of my favorites and teaches this exact lesson. It closes with "Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them." http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#‘XI1 I've found it to be a great technique for making better decis…

I keep this picture of Elon Musk open permanently in one of my Spaces. When feeling unmotivated or risk-adverse, I'll imagine what he would say if I was sitting in the backseat of the Tesla. http://imgur.com/4tsZOIf

I think keeping a picture is a bit extreme, but there were several times when I thought "Hmmm... what would Elon Musk do..." and pursued that course of action.

Re: How startups should die

#63

Post by pratik661 »

dkersten wrote: post #54
mattzito wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends (imo), on the amount of money you have left and who its from. If you've raised $1m from well-to-do-but-not-rich family members and with $500k left you're realized you're totally unqualified to be in your business, or the concept was terrible, no valid pivot, etc., then yeah, give the people back your money. But if you've raised $1m from professional investors and you have $100k left, for example, you might…

If you had $100k left and you tried the FedEx gamble, and lost, you could very well get done for reckless trading. I don't think that's worth the risk.

It should be a risky venture for the company (ie a new strategy). I think gambling in Las Vegas would count as fraudulent.

Re: How startups should die

#64

Post by xerophtye »

smtddr wrote: post #31
connerbryan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eeesh. Nothing is more uncomfortable than a friend who owes you money.

A rule my father taught me when I was young. "Never loan money to a friend with the expectation that you'll get it back, be ready to just let it go."

eh? but OP didn't LOAN him money.He just used a fundraising platform developed and run by a friend of his. So since everyone donated the money to platform (like kickstarter) and the platform didn't transfer it to OP, the platform became indebted to him.

Re: How startups should die

#65

Post by smacktoward »

vacri wrote: post #60
3327 wrote: post #4

Basically boils down to an 'honor code'. When you are going down imagine yourself as a great person and that history will remember every action you did. If you keep your respect and dignity people will respect you and you live to fight another day. If not no matter how successful you may or may not be, someone will someday say: "yeah its a great company but he fu*ked so so so over". You don't want to be that person.…

This isn't really true. AirBnB got to greatness by using a lot of shady tactics earlier on, and HN was split half-half on whether this was a good thing or not. History essentially forgot those shady tactics, and AirBnB is a gorilla now.

"The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten." -- Honoré de Balzac

Re: How startups should die

#66

Post by rralian »

My first startup was a bit of a fad. A fast rise to millions of users, and then a slow peter out -- no matter what we tried. We also didn't know what we were doing, to be fair. Anyway, as we were on our last legs we got a couple offers for our email list of about 6 million users. My co-founder wanted to take them to get some money out of it, but it was an easy "no" for me. We were doing this on the side of day jobs, so failure probably didn't feel quite as catostrophic and we didn't feel as desperate. Still, probably a good thing he would have had no idea how to get at the database (designer).

Re: How startups should die

#67

Post by rmason »

telephonetemp wrote: post #41
rmason wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather worked in real estate and owned a number of commercial buildings that he lost during the great depression. It took him sixteen years, but he paid every one of his creditors off with interest. I always took it as an example of the right way to act. But I have relatives that thought he was a fool not to declare bankruptcy and move on. There will always be people on both sides of that question, but he con…

Interesting story. Did your grandfather make the money to pay off his creditors through entrepreneurship? How did his career go once he had paid off the debt?

Yes he started a business installing furnaces. He was well respected by the guys who survived in real estate and had no problem finding business. When the war was over he did go back to real estate but never as big as before. He explained that he never would again be comfortable to be so highly leveraged.

Re: How startups should die

#68

Post by milesokeefe »

vacri wrote: post #60
3327 wrote: post #4

Basically boils down to an 'honor code'. When you are going down imagine yourself as a great person and that history will remember every action you did. If you keep your respect and dignity people will respect you and you live to fight another day. If not no matter how successful you may or may not be, someone will someday say: "yeah its a great company but he fu*ked so so so over". You don't want to be that person.…

This isn't really true. AirBnB got to greatness by using a lot of shady tactics earlier on, and HN was split half-half on whether this was a good thing or not. History essentially forgot those shady tactics, and AirBnB is a gorilla now.

What were some of those shady tactics?

Re: How startups should die

#69

Post by vacri »

milesokeefe wrote: post #68
vacri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really true. AirBnB got to greatness by using a lot of shady tactics earlier on, and HN was split half-half on whether this was a good thing or not. History essentially forgot those shady tactics, and AirBnB is a gorilla now.

What were some of those shady tactics?

I can't remember the detail, just the arguments really. I recall things like misrepresenting themselves to people on craigslist and violating things like 'don't send me promotional material' settings.

Re: How startups should die

#70

Post by mathattack »

Causalien wrote: post #26
jaf12duke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I can't remember what the exact figure was--but it was in the 5 figures. Which for me felt like a potential life-saver. I don't think what I promised my users was actually that relevant. It would've been super easy to change our terms of service to include the ability to sell or rent user data. I could have written it in a way no one would have understand. Of course, no one would have ever seen the change an…

In this situation. Do you think your moral obligation to repay your debt outweight the moral obligation to your user's data? Or compare this to the moral obligation to repay your investor vs that of the user's data.

Exactly. Could you be open for a lawsuit if you didn't pay your creditors in order to respect the privacy of the email holders?

It's a very fine point, against the backdrop of a very good article.

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