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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"

#91

Post by tptacek »

javajosh wrote: post #21
_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…

Actually I agree. That's why small claims court should precede the public shaming.

Small claims court? How many days outstanding is the invoice? You want to take a guess about the longest it's ever taken us to get paid for an invoice?

Net-30 (meaning, let's just pretend we're going to pay you within 30 days of getting invoiced so we can stop talking about this part of the contract) is a standard term. Is it your expectation that when you don't have a contract, you can expect "Net-1" payment?

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

#92

Post by antidoh »

kika wrote: post #63
_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!"

Or more generally "something is interesting here."

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

#93

Post by tptacek »

saurik wrote: post #89
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 even think we have enough context to learn that lesson. I can easily see the email from the CEO having been an apology/prayer (with the understanding that it migh not have worked out), followed by not just a stern "no, seriously" but instead including a threat of legal action. People throw these threats into all kinds I thins, whether it be something as simple as a request for a refund on a $1 purchase or a t…

Yes. It helps. You cannot whip up a storm of angry Redditors when you are told by a client "send this invoice to finance@", because that is where invoices normally go.

From what I've seen so far, this client did two things wrong:

* They scoffed at the invoice

* They told the vendor to send the invoice to legal@

If the client had declined to do EITHER of those things --- not both, just not do one of them --- there wouldn't be even half as much drama as there is now. "Send it to legal@" was just a dumb move.

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

#94

Post by asto »

_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…

Poor guy is hard up for cash and getting it up here might get someone in authority at YC to fix the problem. As for lynch mobs, her twitter profile shows no signs of such a thing. That's 1 for Reddit/HN and 0 for her as far as maturity is concerned.

Lastly, I wouldn't care even if some internet lynch mobbing were going on. Between being broke for no fault of mine because x behaved irresponsibly and making x's life miserable so that I can be slightly better than broke, I would pick the latter.

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

#95

Post by tptacek »

brudgers wrote: post #67
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.

Of course your counsel is going to tell you to pay it. It's $780. Who gives a shit about $780?

I'm not advocating the "get legal to push back on the invoice" strategy; I'm just saying, you don't have to rule it out to slowroll an invoice.

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

#96

Post by tptacek »

javajosh wrote: post #26
faramarz wrote: post #22

Not handled professionally on the designers part. He could have turned this into a win by being their go-to-guy for future contract work or getting referrals to other YC residents instead. I don't think it was worth resorting to public shaming for a few grand. I guess Eligible got some free press out of this now. Well done!

If what the designer saying is true, then Eligible breached contract. Verbal contracts are binding in CA. And he is within his rights to get paid for his work. It should not damage his reputation at all.

Oral contracts are binding everywhere in the US.

What's damaging to his reputation isn't pursuing the invoice based on an oral contract. What's damaging to his reputation is if he jumped the gun, whipping up drama about a receivable that he reasonably could have expected to get paid if he simply invoiced persistently.

I suspect this thread might be a bit of a litmus test for people who have done a lot of freelancing. From working with designers a bit, I can tell that this is a hot-button issue for them: a lot of clients do shirk payment, and so they tend to insist on upfront payment of some sort before they commence work. But having said that, I have to believe every freelancer is familiar with delayed payments on invoices. Your most lucrative clients might pay many months late, and then only after persistent reminders.

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

#97

Post by ximeng »

_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…

YC also seems discomforted, it's only about half way down the front page with 196 votes in an hour. (Top item has 117 points in 3 hours).

Perhaps this is due to flags from people who don't like the story, or maybe mods have manually down-ranked it.

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

#98

Post by Silhouette »

tptacek wrote: post #85
damoncali wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the legal@ was meant to be equivalent to fuckoff@. That was my reading, at least. Lesson: Get paid first when working with new clients. There just is no other way.

fuckoff@ is one interpretation. how_serious_are_you@ is another one.

That may be true, but it's a risky thing to do just to see if someone's serious. The moment you refer me to real laywers, you have probably removed any opportunity for me to be nice to you and settle the disagreement amicably, even if you subsequently realise you've been an ass all along and want to make it all go away quietly. If nothing else, if I think you're asking me to speak to your lawyers, it's probably not me who's calling, it's my lawyers. And now everyone's paying someone's legal fees, and if you were trying to screw me, I'm pretty much going to make sure it's you who pays everything if at all possible. (Clearly this varies somewhat by where you are and how your local legal system works.)

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

#99

Post by tptacek »

Silhouette wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fuckoff@ is one interpretation. how_serious_are_you@ is another one.

That may be true, but it's a risky thing to do just to see if someone's serious. The moment you refer me to real laywers, you have probably removed any opportunity for me to be nice to you and settle the disagreement amicably, even if you subsequently realise you've been an ass all along and want to make it all go away quietly. If nothing else, if I think you're asking me to speak to your lawyers, it's probably not m…

Are we debating? I don't think we are. I think "send it to legal@" was poor messaging; "send it to finance@" would have accomplished the same thing without escalating the situation.

Having said that: "send it to legal@" is not "breach of contract". Sorry, it just isn't.

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

#100

Post by dr42 »

untog wrote: post #45
dr42 wrote: post #20

I hope the screenshot is fake data and not violating anyone's HIPPA rights, otherwise this designer is going to be in a lot of very hot water over this.

If Eligible sent confidential data to a contract designer for the purposes of a mockup then they deserve everything they get. I don't- for a second- think that they did.

Well they (Eligible) have already demonstrated a flagrant disregard for other people with this whole incident.
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