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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

If anybody else is also put off by the writing style: There is some actual content there. One just needs to get through the first third which basically just repeats the headline.

TL;DR (without my opinion added): Top Management started too late to think about making actual money. They also hired an asshole for their US offices. When they got an opportunity to be bought by Twitter they asked for way too much money. And the CEO is bascially on a constant holidays trip since 2014, while not failing to rub it in everybody's face via Instagram photos.

Personal opinion: I don't understand these CEOs who start cashing out before either selling their business or making it a viable paid service, while being so close to a lifetime solution to the problem of money. I mean he already went 80% of the way, much further than most.

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> If anybody else is also put off by the writing style:

The writing style is just fine, it's surprisingly high quality considering this is coming from Buzzfeed (even if it's the new serious branch).

Just an FYI, the investigative news division of BuzzFeed has been around for something like two years now. It's not so new anymore. :)

Don't tell anybody but this was exactly my thinking. "Oh, Buzzfeed no wonder. Well, at least they really try to become serious."

Maybe he already cashed out? We increasingly hear of founders taking money off the table by selling a part of their share when it comes time to raise a series-B or later round. SoundCloud was likely well past the series-B stage, and i wouldn't be surprised if the founder already has a few million in the bank.

They have. But still, every founder wants to avoid such situations. The founding team's reputation went from sky to hell within few weeks. Not nice and nobody wants to loose their face like this.

Yes he already cashed out, but apparently too early. For a normal life with a house and a little travel here and there his money is enough, but for this from-burning-man-to-private-jet lifestyle he will be broke in 5 years. A Twitter buyout would have made his lifestyle probably viable though.

Now it will produce shaming news for 1-2 years before someone buys it for a few million, drops 80% of the staff and then turns it into a low-level cash cow to fund his own private jet.

Actually, I could see an argument that SoundCloud has to have a presence at burning man... It's the ground-zero meat space for their content corpus.

> It's the ground-zero meat space for their content corpus

What do mean with this sentence and content corpus??

That burning man matches their DNA?

Are you being purposefully obtuse? He's saying that one could make the argument that meeting new people at the epicenter of your prospective user's culture would help growth ultimately. This is also referred to as "boots on the ground" marketing.

No, I find his sentence just odd. I googled 'content corpus' and couldn't find anything meaningful, thus my comment.

I assumed something in the direction what you wrote, btw way better articulated, but I wanted to get it confirmed.

Late response, but I simply mean the collection of content on the site. Burning man is a major center for electronic music. You probably wouldn't be surprised by the head of Netflix going to Cannes, by contrast.

I really like this argument. And if judge the CEOs personality correctly he will have told 500 people that he's the boss of SoundCloud BEFORE even telling his name once.

I agree. I think SoundCloud's troubles came primarily from poor management. Throughout the monetization process, top management seemed to be hoping that the "business guys" would figure it out while they stayed in their comfort zones.

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