Yik Yak fires 30 of 50 employees
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
An ex-engineer from Yik Yak reached out while we were hiring a while back.
They proceeded to supply a .zip file of their entire source code repository (yes, all of it). They said it was outdated now so it seemed okay in their eyes.
This included all of the dot files for configuration: keys, passwords, email addresses, Amazon instances where databases were at, and more.
I didn't ask for this .zip file, I was simply looking for some examples of experience.
Needless to say, it definitely made me look at Yik Yak differently.
However, I have no expertise in the subject so I could be wrong.
> "A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge"
It's defense in depth, not security through obscurity.
On the other hand, there's "defense in depth" too. Just in case we made a mistake, let's not make it any easier on the hacker then we need to.
Social hacking in particular (gaining access to employee, who has access to local network, which has access to server X, which connects to the database...) can be assisted by inside information.
It's the difference between - "What security controls were in place at Corp?" and "What security controls would you put in place to protect X system?"
The 1st version is bad, not just because it discloses security controls at the previous employer.. but also because it makes the candidate responsible for (possibly bad) security decisions that were outside of their control and/or existed before they were hired.
The 2nd version gives the candidate a chance to talk generally/ideally about security.. even if the previous employer did something else.
But isn't it relevant what technologies you used in your most recent roles?
Let me put it this way: is he also going to ask about the candidate's religion, expecting the answer to be "I can't answer that"?
That said, I doubt you will come across any fast growing startup whose early codebase was exquisite enough to put on github.
A lot of early startup codebase will be messy by nature and it't not fair to "look at a company differently" just because of that. In many cases what happens is the founders try out all kinds of things to make it work, and one day it starts working suddenly, and it works so well that they don't have time to go back and refactor anything because they have to focus on sustaining the growth.
Not saying that's how it should be, just sharing my perspective on why these things happen.
It's a frightening insight into the culture of a company where that it is both possible to do that and not thought to be wrong.
> Needless to say, it definitely made me look at Yik Yak differently.
As I said, that's messed up that the guy thought that way but I don't think it's the company's fault. I can do the same for my employer what this guy did since I have access to a lot of private information, but that's my fault, not the company's fault for trusting their employee.
This one unethical guy who doesn't even work there anymore, who's not even one of the founders, makes unethical decisions. And suddenly the entire company he used to work for--which really did nothing wrong and has nothing to do with this guy's behavior--is unethical?
I never responded... because I heard that they had shot themselves in the foot with recent app changes, and were dying. Obviously, now I'm glad that I made the right call.
I've seen this happen numerous times in my career, though. I just don't understand the sort of denial that keeps companies in "hire mode", even when their internal metrics must make it obvious that things have turned south.
_Jerk_ CEOs are happy to do that. There are plenty of ethical founders and managers out there that loath this type of behavior.
Unfortunately I see more of this flavor at venture backed companies....
The only thing which seems likely to change that would be more of a cost for failure, since it's otherwise too easy to gamble everything on the small probability of a huge win versus a more attainable decent return, and it makes it harder for well-managed companies since they're competing with the gamblers for users and staff.
Completely unnecessary. Your initial point is a good anecdote, but globalizing it to all CEOs is completely unfair. Also, I reject the "us vs them" mentality of labor vs management. That sort of sentiment causes more trouble than it's worth.
Do investments of this size/nature typically have a raise-or-pay-us-back date associated with them? i.e. are they usually done as a convertible note to force the issue or pure equity?
Disclaimer: I've never been in this situation personally
I was thinking more about the situation where the founders fire all the employees, run the operation as lean as possible (to maintain their obligations), and stretch the $62M as long as they can. At $2M/year that's 31 years without accounting for any growth of the money itself.
Besides due diligence on the part of the investors to not give money to the kind of person that would do that, what prevents that situation?
The sad thing is, a lot of these apps are really successful in the outset, but then end up burned as the companies try, heavy handedly, to monetise.
As much as the startup world sees themselves as morally above the like of Google who will sell out customers, many startups seem to sell out both their customers and their product, making fundamentally incompatible changes with what they were built on in the pursuit of cash.
There are many dimensions in which to monetise, the simplest being getting users hooked and then charging a fee, and others that are more complex, and all of these vary in how much money they will bring in and how many users will reject them.
What I don't understand is why startups so often choose monetisation strategies that have such huge drawbacks in the context of their "killer features". In this case, in order to sell out their users (and build profiles ripe for exploitation in the most honest, business sense), they also had to sell out the purpose of the app: anonymity.
It's likely that in an alternate universe, YikYak tried something with a lower yield to what they saw with this strategy, but didn't headshot their customerbase.
The CEO had an unconventional background (was in med school at Furman), so I was interested in knowing how he made it. I was shocked to see that he didn't have any insights about how anything at the firm worked. I asked him how he raised funds, he replied that he found a family friend who worked in startups and everything was good from there.
I wasn't interested in getting a job as I already have one, but the arrogant hiring manager didn't stop his attempts at (literally) pushing me towards a computer and asking me to apply.
The (now, unfortunate) engineers were the only people who had some clue what they were doing (they had some really decent cross-language optimization problems)...
To be fair though, half of the people asking questions during the Q&A were angry teachers and parents, grandstanding about how they don't sensor enough. I can see how that might wear you down.
I would have cut them a break if they hadn't generally come off as arrogant pricks.
Being laid off means someone's position was eliminated. Being fired means someone was terminated for cause, i.e. because of something they did (or didn't do).
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I'd have thought anybody could tell them that was too many...
Wasn't Snapchat or Instagram at around that until fairly recently? Yik Yak is no Snapchat or Instagram.
Oh, so what? Ars is trying to spin it off like the former caused the latter, while it's definitely the opposite. They hired too many people and realized it was time to let some go. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a company trying to rectify its mistakes. Instagram had 13 employees at acquisition, Yik Yak might have expanded too fast, but they're fixing it.
> still doesn’t have any obvious source of meaningful revenue. Yet somehow ... valued ... at $400 million in December 2014"
Plenty of companies have no revenue model initially, and can be valued at millions of dollars: Snapchat $800m in 2013[1], Instagram acquired at $1b.
Maybe i'm too naive, but a company makes plenty of epic mistakes throughout its lifetime, and can do some pretty outrageous things (Zuck's business cards [2]) but that doesn't mean they're incompetent, just learning. This article's trying to shovel as much dirt as it can on the company with cherry picked incidents about trouble the company's run into, and it's not a lot of trouble honestly. How is a company's experimentation with mandatory user handles part of a post on its downsizing?
[1]: http://qz.com/97467/snapchats-complete-inability-to-make-mon...
[2]: http://nextshark.com/heres-the-story-behind-mark-zuckerbergs...
They should still have a big chunk of that $62 million left in the bank, if they only had 50 employees. Cutting that to 20 should give them a few years of runway.