Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

I think HN just has a low tolerance for willful incompetence, especially when charging gigantic fees to the consumer. As has been pointed out by other articles, despite many warning signs that this festival would be impossible to pull off as advertised, the organizers continued to crank the hype machines into turbo mode while slurping up cash from consumers till the last minute. It's a scam.

View on HN

Well if you think about the fact that almost every startup that goes through YC raises probably $1M+ after demo day, and 9 out of 10 investments likely to lose, but hey move fast and break things as long as it's not a concert for rich people.

In fact your comment could just as well be about many "unicorns" in tech who seem far more than willfully incompetant (e.g. Theranos; Uber); or according to who you ask Etherium (for being hacked and/or forking); and from the sound of press maybe MagicLeap the billion dollar startup who cant seem To launch a product may end up fitting the mold.

Uber had over 5 billion dollars in net revenue last year. Theranos had zero.

Well, Theranos and Etherium are met with frequent criticism on this board with good reason, but the issue isn't about losing out on an investment - which is obviously a risk with any company and clearly not applicable in the case of Uber - but rather, negligent, reckless or fraudulent behavior dressed up in tons of marketing buzz and obfuscated by insane levels of hype that functions only to inflate the ego and perceived prestige of the founders while simultaneously fleecing consumers of their money. The bigger the hype to inevitable-reality gap, the bigger the schadenfreude payoff when the scammer house of cards finally collapses in on itself.

> negligent, reckless or fraudulent behavior dressed up in tons of marketing buzz and obfuscated by insane levels of hype

Sounds like Uber to me.

Yes people got rides and it's a good product, but they still took operations to cities/counties all over the world illegally. Drivers are the ones who are stuck holding the with damaged driving records, and in some cases criminal records, for nothing more that operating under Uber. For example in Miami alone there are still $3.5M worth of outstanding fines from drivers when they were illegally operating as rides for hire.

Multiple that by how many cities? Then extend that business model for to any other illegal activity: drugs, prostitution, murder for hire, etc... but you know hype ($50B unicorn) and marketing buzz (disrupting, sharing economy).

9 out of 10 investments likely to lose

That's true of startups in general but not true of startups that goes through YC. The success rate of YC startups is far higher than normal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com