Newton inventor claims ‘Shark Tank’ is all a lie
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
Shark Tank probably has an innocent explanation, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But my BS detector went through the roof when he suggested that as a settlement for his lawsuit, he would accept being allowed to go back on a show that he claims is a fraud. This makes him sound like nothing more than a desperate, failed business owner that is attempting extort his way back onto the show for the free advertising it offers.
Do you trust a "shark" who claims to have your best interests in mind? If they are good at what they do, yes. All the way up to the time they don't have your best interests in mind.
Production wants to shoot them as quickly as possible, as they are renting very expensive studio space and paying the talent for every shoot day.
Shark Tank is very efficient as far as TV shows go. Some shows, like Big Brother, shoot 100 minutes for every 1 minute aired. Shark Tank is probably closer to 3-5 minutes shot for every 1 minute aired. It's more like a scripted show in that regard. Certainly, all the pitches are memorized and practiced well in advance.
Someone asked my credentials. I worked on Shark Tank for one season as an editor. I have add'l credits on The Voice and Sarah Palin's Alaska for Mark Burnett Productions. I also worked for 10 other production companies on about 25-30 shows for ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and SHOWTIME. Some of them I don't remember. Some of them I would like to forget, for example, Famous in 12: http://www.tmz.com/category/famous-in-12/
Sarah was very protective of her family's image as it was airing close to the time when one of her daughter's was having or had just had a child out of wedlock.
She had good reason to be protective, but this made it difficult to produce an entertaining TV show. So, the show wasn't really a show until it got to post. The executive producers were really worried.
I remember, one of my fellow editors became frustrated with his supervising producer. He threw a stack of papers into the air and slammed the door in his face.
Also, there was a scene where Sarah'a other daughter had a boyfriend over. The boyfriend wanted to go upstairs to her bedroom. Sarah wouldn't allow it, and she demanded he come back down. We edited it so that he never came back down and that she was calling her daughter's name... as if they were up there naked or something... That is where the "lie" is most evident. When there is a clear departure from the truth, but all of TV is a lie, based on excluding the boring parts. Do I feel bad that we changed what really happened? No. That was probably the most memorable moment of the entire season and drove viewership way up for the entire season, resulting in a more satisfying product for viewers.
Also, once Sarah saw the show, she got it. She had the ability to tell us to change anything she didn't like. She didn't want to change that scene or many others. It was gold.
She does love Alaska. Todd, her husband, seems like an awesome guy. They are a pretty normal family, thrown into the limelight by John McCain.
The beginning 1-minute pitch is memorized, but everything after that when sharks are asking questions is totally free-for-all.
I was surprised and impressed by the professionalism and the speed of the production team. They had it down to almost an assembly-line.
Any comments on that one in particular? I wasn't a fan of Palin politically but I saw a bit of the show and she did seem to genuinely love Alaska and want to share it.
TV production is not very exciting. Post-production even less so. A lot of sitting and waiting. A lot of looking through useless footage to try to find the juice.
I have worked in TV for over a decade. I am leaving Santa Monica to move to Mission Bay in San Francisco in November. I hope not to work on another TV show for the rest of my life, but God laughs when we make plans.
Source: Former ENG photographer, production intern, technical director, occasional live broadcast director with an emphasis on sports. (Just tossing it out since people are demanding credentials; I'm not bothered if you believe me or not.)
Edit: Since the guy showed up and backed himself up and I immediately got downvoted, it's worth pointing out that I was actually somewhat standing up for the person and not accusing him of lying unlike the other commenters in this thread. I was suspicious, but not enough to question someone's integrity like other folks in this thread.
edit: no names
But 2% dilution aint THAT bad.
Have you not watched television in the past decade? They're still re-running shows from the 50s! Why would you assume they would throw away the free-at-this-point old episodes? Does ANY non-news show do that?
But from the article there must be more since the guy sued and then settled for $20K? What did the contract say? And the licensing stuff is pretty crazy in TV (so many people want to be "on TV" it really is amazing).
I've never understood this. I have no desire to be on TV. It feels like I'm in the vast minority, but I wonder if it's just a matter of those that don't want to be on TV aren't, and based on their personalities are also less likely to have their views propagated by popular media?
That said, your hypothesis for "TV-Suitable" people isn't far off. A classmate from college went to audition for some reality TV show and basically said the producers look for certain traits such as how dramatic a person is, etc. My friend who's been on Shark Tank is definitely a charming and likeable guy (he's also a genuinely very nice guy).
These two girls twice appeared on Shark Tank. One of the girls used to babysit my kids. The company is still in business.
http://portlandtribune.com/ttt/89-news/129967-lawsuit-prompt...
The one minute movies never ran due to contractual problems between NBC and SAG. We used hidden cameras, and the humans were real unsuspecting people, but I'll admit it's true they didn't accurately portray the everyday lives of actual robots in the real world: the robot's injuries and Professor Johnson's phone number were fake, and the robot waiter was fired.
The point of NBC's one-minute reality shows was to tell short entertaining two-part cliffhanger stories, which NBC would broadcast as interstitial programming at the beginning and end of commercial breaks, to compel people to keep watching TV and submit to more advertisements. [4]
But the point of Will's stories and performance was to explore how people interact and empathize with robots, discover what their beliefs and expectations are, and probe to test how easy humans are to fool or convince to play along with real-time tele-robotic wizard-of-oz man-behind-the-curtain mumbo-jumbo. [5]
"That the women are deluded seems evident; for Mr. Park assures us, that the dress of Mumbo is suffered to hang from a tree at the entrance of each town; which would hardly be the case if the women were not persuaded that it is the dress of some supernatural being"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrArvRG2yQA
Robot competitions have to make producers extra nervous. How do you hold one of those and not end up with a whole bunch of contestants that are nerdy or too ugly for TV?
Well, I'd say that claiming they are getting something that they are not leaves a bad taste in one's mouth, even as a viewer.
Being on TV is basically just wanting to be famous. Wanting to be rich and famous is hardly unusual.
I stopped working for the shark before "Beyond the Tank" came out so I can't speak to the sharper image thing.
This is pretty much how life works too!
A 60 dollar sunshade strapped to a hat isn't niche?
Fedoras are still cool... if worn with a nice suit by a well-groomed person.
Fedoras worn with undershirts and untailored clothes were never cool in the first place.
I don't care if it looks cool, because it keeps my glasses dry in the rain, and the sun out of my face the rest of the time. If I want to be fashionable, I can wear something else, but mostly I just want to be comfortable.
I have this one: http://www.tilley.com/us_en/men/hats/ltm6-airflor.html
Owner's manual is worth a read, if you're unfamiliar: http://www.tilley.com/media/pdf/Tilley-Owners-Manual-EN.pdf
It's a bit more expensive than what I already have, but it looks like they have a lifetime replacement guarantee and a 2-year insurance policy against loss. All other things being equal, I'd rather pay less up front and take greater care with what I bought.
[0] http://www.tilley.com/us_en/men/hats/warm-weather/tilley-wan...
He is not the Apple Newton's inventor.
I like things that help battle the elements, but this isn't my cup of tea. It appears that he's also kickstarted the thing about three years ago (only to ~$10,000 in funding) and people are complaining about not receiving the item: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/36197580/finally-the-wo...
My current system of dealing with rain in the Pacific Northwest is combining a well made rain jacket with a wool baseball cap (Ebbets Fields makes some) - it solves the problem of wearing glasses in the rain pretty well. There's probably some really niche uses for the nubrella, but there's other solutions already (camera rain covers, waterproof phones/phone cases/etc).
* Rain can come at you from many more angles than just straight down
* Wind will rip apart anything remotely a sail, like the top of his device
* How do I put it on as I exit a car?
I remember seeing an article from the founder of a company that was on ST estimating that the PR/Exposure was probably worth in the ballpark of $3m. I'd agree with that; a random re-run years after the initial episode would still bring in a huge amount of traffic - at no cost to us. I'd estimate we got 3-5 re-runs every quarter.
I'll throw it out there too that there was a huge delay between filming BTT and when the episode aired.
This is a show is on ABC which is over the air broadcast TV. The most mainstream there is. I guarantee there are a ton of people who don't know the nuances of reality TV.
I guess Shark Tank is where you go when all normal investors have already turned you down.
Sounds like this guy just struggled with his business and it basically ran into the ground.
I saw an interview with Mark Cuban that was completely unrelated to the subject, but touched Shark Tank briefly and he explained how it worked.
Funny, when I saw the Nubrella, Sharper Image is the first thing that came to mind.
I think a lot of diligence and deal details have to be worked out. They ask who else own shares but they don't even go through a cap table.
I know the sharks have been disappointed when entrepreneurs turned out not to be "serious" and just show up for exposure.
This person may have been scammed, but it is also possible that one red flag ended the diligence. ("Wait? how much debt?!")
The thing that remains a mystery is this follow up episode. But that makes no sense on both sides. How do you get pressured to do a follow up episode if you never saw an investment?
Be careful who you deal with, and force them to act sooner rather than later. When dealing with the Sharks I don't know if you really can force them to act and cut a check, they can just say they will and run re-runs, potentially screwing your future investment opportunities.
The sad reality is that it's not even about applying and catching a break anymore... I'm not surprised.. it's TV.
That said, I think this guy's story sounds fishy.
He's not claiming anything that the producers won't readily admit, so this should be fairly straightforward. He seems to have some merit to his claim that re-runs should show the original air date, other than that everything he claims is laughable.
If I lived somewhere else it probably would have made a bigger impression on me but I honestly see weird devices all the time in the Boston area (particularly fairly bizarre recumbent bikes and skating devices particularly as you approach Cambridge).
Everything on television is at least a little bit fake. If I'm being completely honest I enjoy ST just to see the pitches and check out interesting new products. I couldn't care less what happens after the show. I bet a lot of viewers are like me.
I remember seeing something in a magazine a decade or so back about a Japanese person who did something very similar.
I've been in contact with several of the of the entrepreneurs featured there, one of whom is a YC-backed entrepreneur (MTailor), and also for what it's worth I have another contact (via email) that I don't want to name.
I haven't been on the show or anything like that. Why would you say that it is a "lie"?
A lot of deals fall through. What specifically would you consider a "lie"?
Examples of a lie would be if there were never any money that ever changed hands, etc.
Other than that, it seems to be genuine
>but no investor can adequately research a business in the 15 minutes it takes to shoot each pitch.
You claim to have worked on shark tank but somewhere I heard that the pitches are much longer (up to an hour+) and get edited down, whereas you claim that it is 15 minutes, about the running time. So who's right?
For this reason I would like you to name what crosses the lie threshold for you, and give just a bit more of your credentials.
For the rest of us reading this I will state that the biggest "lie" isn't a lie at all: getting exposure on shark tank is a huuuuuuge amount of value for any company. But this is not something that any entrepreneur mentions (or it gets cut). I've never heard anyone say "Do you realize that when this airs, based on my talks with other founders we will get about five hundred thousand hits to our web site? So far we have a 7% closing rate on every single visitor who has ever come to our site." or anything like that... it's the elephant in the room that nobody really mentions, except a few times the sharks refer to it obliquely as 'gold-diggers' etc. but it's not mentioned in a positive light, for example when negotiating about valuations. I haven't seen anything else that seems to be a lie to me! (And this includes personal contact as mentioned at the top.)
- The show makes it seem like the pitch lasts 15 minutes when it generally lasts much longer in reality (I've talked to a friend who has been on the show that has verified this).
- The show makes it seem much more dramatic than it actually is by overlapping dialogue, rearranging and timing reaction shots, and using music (to the extend of fabricating a conversation)
- The show makes it seem like an exact deal is made in 15 minutes when there is much more involved before and after the show
It's interesting that some people think of TV as somehow "true." Maybe it is emotionally true, but it is not reality. Reality is having to commute 90 minutes to work on a TV show that portrays reality falsely as many of my colleagues do.
You may not know this, but in normal negotiations with startups, there are many, many meetings involved over a very long period of time. So many deals fall through that there had to be a Handshake protocol invented just to keep VC's to their word - https://www.ycombinator.com/handshake/
"Silicon valley runs on handshake deals." Yeah, due dilligence gets done afterward, not on the spot! Of course all pitches are rehearsed very, very heavily. I mean these are actual businesses that were built for a decade at times, you know?
I think you go way too far writing "with just enough truth to keep 'suspension of disbelief' aloft." These are real businesses that continue whether or not anyone ever films them again. They're actual deals. A lie would be if these businesses (and their sales numbers, etc) were fabricated out of thin air and did not actually exist. Example: Silicon Valley, the show, like Pied Piper. If Pied Piper were presented as reality, and its numbers shown as reality, without even so much as existing - that would be a lie.
The most telling is that you call Mark Cuban, who is by no means a celebrity first and investor second, a "talent". He's not some actor playing a role on Shark Tank.
So I simply am not on board with your original comment that I replied to - it goes too far.
You should have simply said that the interactions were heavily edited, and represent deals that continue after the part that is aired.
A lie would be if an actor were playing the character invented for the "talents" you mentioned, but these people did not exist in real life, were not really business people at all, let alone actual investors investing in startups with real deals, or if the businesses were fabricated.
So after reviewing what you've written I would suggest that you tone it down a bit. I had skype conversations with the businesses shown. My conversations had a startup on the other side - I wasn't talking with some character, like Homer Simpson. They also matched what I saw on screen (more or less, of course, heavily edited.)
These are businesses first, and short shark tank segments only incidentally. They're not lies or fabrications.
This guy... and his 'skype conversations' with entrepreneurs lol
Says who? You?
HN is a community of people interested in hacking. I don't recall submitting a Carnegie Mellon degree to join.
As an editor myself, editing is a great form of hacking. Your job is to build a timeline to very often immovable constraints measured in seconds; to consult a library of techniques and effects to produce a desirable presentation. Shit, editors even get the best A/B testing of all when test screenings are involved.
When Katrina happened my job was to show my audience what was going on. There wasn't even time to edit -- I've "edited" news live on air by pushing the TD out of the way because I knew what was there. This included hot patching. If this doesn't remind you of a late night optimizing your growth metrics, I don't know what will.
Above all, an editor is the silent hand in a production guiding your feelings as a viewer. If I linger on someone's face after they're done speaking, you're going to study their emotions and likely transfer them. If I cut away immediately you get distracted by the next thing. If I hold too long it ruins the moment and makes you realize you are watching television. That's the thought that goes into a single edit. Editors tell you how to feel and you don't even know it. That's almost the purest of UX design.
Engineers aren't special and there is no single definition of hacking. There is a lot of ingenuity and craft that goes into things with which you are not familiar.
> He's not some actor
Talent is an industry term for "the people paid to be on camera," and applies to anybody. It is the antonym of crew and exists because "cast" doesn't always apply. It is not a career. Mark Cuban became talent when he agreed to perform his services on a television show. You don't know this because you're not in television, which is perspective you do not have and oddly ironic given that you're basically lecturing this guy for lack of perspective on your field.
You are being incredibly condescending to someone you don't know, including explaining negotiations to someone after admitting you don't know what experience they have. I didn't have to go far in their comment history to determine that you've almost certainly misjudged them.
After reviewing what you've written I would suggest that you tone it down a bit. Yours is honestly the most out-of-place comment I've read on Hacker News in a while, regardless of who you are or what authority you think you've been granted to speak on behalf of the community.
(I opt out of your representation, thanks.)
>I worked on Shark Tank. It is a lie (but not unlike almost every other TV show) with just enough truth to keep "suspension of disbelief" aloft.
that is a wildly inaccurate mischaracterization. Your whole comment is off-base because you missed that. No, there is not "just enough truth to keep suspension of disbelief aloft" with the whole thing being a lie.
It's genuine negotiation that reflects real businesses, real talks with investors, and real investment.
There is one fake aspect, which I highlighted: when discussing the valuation, the entrepreneurs don't tell the sharks about the shark tank exposure ("when this airs... ") even though it is a huge point of leverage.
Shark Tank in my estimation is not inherently a lie (except this part). It is heavily edited, obviously.
Use of that word is inappropriate.
My:
>I've come to the conclusion that your calling the show a lie is completely unwarranted
is the summary of the comment you object to. A video editor can't come here and start calling a pitch event an inherent lie with just enough truth for suspension of disbelief. That's not wht it is.
The troll reply by wutangson1
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wutangson1
might have affected your judgment, as it purposefully badly misquotes that HN is not for video editors in specific (by leaving out "in specific") and taking a trollish tone. There's nothing unusual about a skype conversation with a startup. For what it's worth, the reason I didn't mention the name of my contact is due to not wanting this kind of trolling.
Shark Tank is real. Anyone with a company reading this can apply and exposure on it will likely be beneficial if it happens. There's nothing inherently fake about it, other than not mentioning its own effect. (I've also never heard an entrepreneur give a purposefully evasive answer to margins saying, "well I don't want to give an exact amount to all the shark tank viewers, but our bill of materials is in the low single digit percentages" rather than saying "it costs us $1 to make and we sell it for $39.99")
Except for those self-referential aspects missing, the show appears to me to be reality.
I don't sense a productive future from this thread, sorry. And no, I'm not deleting anything. You should re-read what both you and I have written tomorrow.
I agree and don't want to clutter this thread any worse. If you want you can email me (profile has it) but I won't reply here any more. I enjoy your other posts on HN.
The popup does not have an obvious bold "close" or "X" in the right hand corner or the bottom right, it has a very light grey close in the upper left, and also does not respond to clicking outside the modal dialog.
Thats enough to consider that a dark pattern.