https://www.reddit.com/r/timferriss/comments/3g2mjg/tim_ferr...
"Startup L. Jackson @StartupLJackson Sep 4
[Startup L. Jackson Retweeted Ced]
How to make your team completely ineffective.
Treat communication & collaboration w hostility.
Done."
This is unacceptable behavior from any business.
Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."
The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.
(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)
Thanks for getting in touch. I would love to just have my account deleted and move on. No need for Michael to contact me.
The loss of your own reputation is going to be harder to come back from. Reputable VCs doing even basic due diligence are going to see this incident and aren't going to want to have anything to do with you, unless you show swift and decisive action, one way or another. So far your response has been neither swift nor decisive.
For what it's worth, asking Michael to contact OP seems like a really bad idea. He's hardly shown good customer services skills so far, do you really think he's going to do a better job suddenly?
This is important because it never occurs to most users that you might edit their profile, and so it never occurs to them that you might edit other users' profiles. Thus, when people see something on someone else's profile they assume the person put it there.
If I had stocks in the company, I’d have sold by now. It’d be a miracle if the company would still be up and running by next week.
Mishandling personal information is a big deal.
It seems a little strange that that was the course of action taken here.
customer‑focused ... and professional
Might want to re-think that too.
this is too good, it could only get better if you could somehow manage to slip "soon" in your reply.
So far everything you and your cofounders have done has made this problem worse and larger.
You are untrustworthy and incompetent.