HQ CEO: If You Run This Profile, We’ll Fire Our Host | Hacker News Reader

HQ CEO: If You Run This Profile, We’ll Fire Our Host

thedailybeast.com

327 pointscoloneltcb70 comments

If anyone here is looking for a startup idea: hire Scott at twice what he's making, clone HQ Trivia, and make him a cofounder instead of a contractor. The market has been validated, it's clear that the market cares about Scott as a person (they're dressing up as him for Halloween!), and it seems doubtful that he enjoys being a contractor given all of this.

This is probably exactly what the founder is frightened of. They have miscalculated badly and made Scott their brand. And Scott is free to move on as he wishes.

Or equivalently, miscalculated badly in treating him as a disposable contractor instead of an employee.

Glad you mentioned it. Starts to make sense why he was freaking out. People have idolized this guy who turns out is just a contractor for the startup. It would have been avoided if they shuffled the person doing the trivia or whatever it is.

They've been trying it recently, there have been 3 other hosts (that I've seen) in the past 2 weeks. My own personal opinion is that they've only achieved at making Scott look better.

I hope someone does this. I've been playing HQ for a few weeks, and it is deeply clear to me that their success has much to do with his hosting. When someone else fills in for him, it's sometimes painful to watch. Scott has some "thing" that makes the game very enjoyable -- maybe it's wit or confidence or something, but I have not seen another host work as well as he does. If the founders are being this petty, then let them reap what they sow.

Presumably Scott will be finding an agent and signing a SAG contract sounds ideal for Amazon /Netfix v cheap to produce compare to GOT etc.

Dam you could use Alexa for the contestants mmm Time to talk to my Contacts at BECTU

This! They basically validated the market for any tech video entertainment giant to copy their idea and completely destroy them. Let's not forget that Amazon just released those echo buttons which are basically the IoT version of a trivia game. So they already have a declared intention to pursue ideas around this.

To not go that far, even Snapchat can add something like this to their app with no difficulty. They already have the right infrastructure and context to pull this off.

> Over 170,000 people waited in the game’s lobby to play the HQ on Sunday night.

It seems like no easy feat to build out an app that streams live video as well as trivia questions/answers to 170k concurrent users. Does anyone have a guess at how they went about architecting a product like this?

Side note: They have a lot of experience, as some of the co-founders also co-founded Vine.

I feel like I'd buy that in the short term - that's what VC money is for. (And perhaps in the long term too.) The hard part is the live streaming; sending <1 kilobyte of data to 170k concurrent users every few seconds isn't a fundamentally challenging problem (it's on the order of 1Gbps outbound traffic). YouTube has a live-streaming API I'd be inclined to build a proof of concept with and see how far that gets me; if not, a couple minutes of Googling finds me Ustream, owned by IBM, charging $99-$999/month for their "professional" tier, and Livestream (.com) charging $799 for their "enterprise" tier, with both having a call-us-if-you-need-more tier. That's cheap enough that you can fund the tech side on this on even just the old-school YC $20K until you have enough traction to do a better job of it.

They've had some technical issues, including some games that started ~60 minutes late.

The livestreaming you just partner with a CDN who serves the content for you. Questions and answers for 170k concurrents users isn't super hard, just make sure your backing datastore is a horizontally scalable kv store. Any of the cloud providers can give you a datastore capable of this.

Wow, that is a completely absurd reaction from the co-founder. He could've gotten some great, free PR for the company out of the story.

Instead, he's about to be on the front page of HN and probably several other media outlets, in a story centered around him and portraying him as a shitty boss that nobody would want to work for or with.

Hopefully everything works out well for Mr. Rogowski.

Especially as the guy's a contractor, he can do whatever the hell he wants.

It's like it is becoming the new normal in startups, treat contractors like they're your personal slaves, while you can drop them whenever you want.

It's a reminder of why employment laws are so necessary.

I guess the problem could be that he find himself in a situation where his app is being associated with a contractor they hired, and he doesn't want to further solidify him as "the brand".

Imagine if MySpace Tom was just a contractor that could leave to join the competition any day.

Panic mode, which result in observed nutty behaviour.

So why use him on all your marketing material if you are afraid of him just up and leaving?

Greed. They want the short term profit from it.

It happens with TV all the time. House was Hugh Laurie. You couldn't possibly replace him. I presume there are standard contracts to help deal with that when you anticipate it, but it seems to always be expensive to keep a star.

> It happens with TV all the time.

We're seeing it with #metoo right now - the most drastic example is of course Kevin Spacey with House of Cards, but I wonder how many other core stars will have similar problems with sexualized misconduct, and how TV series (and movies) will react to this.

> Especially as the guy's a contractor, he can do whatever the hell he wants.

If he was a contract employee, how would that be different?

Agree with everything you said, but I think Yusupov is regretting having Scott being so prominent, and the article is just making him more important to the app. So he lost it. It happens. But it does make him look bad.

The founder profiled in the article just tweeted:

> Looking for a good PR agent. DM me if interested!

https://twitter.com/rus/status/933075047039856642

Needs help and media training badly. Past that, good sense to know to not apply additional pressure to your popular contract employee, while on another phone call with a reporter, and ask

> “Now they want to reframe the story as me threatening to fire you. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

The problem isn't his media training, the problem is his moral compass. Treat your employees with respect just as you'd treat any human being with dignity.

Honestly, that was the weirdest moment. Plenty of people are foolish enough to try to threaten reporters, including by threatening their sources - it's a bad idea, but not exceptional.

But effectively blackmailing an employee while on a call with a reporter you've already threatened? Surely even the biggest bully should be able to see how that'll work out.

(And, of course, a PR flack could probably explain how "off the record" works, and why it should have started both conversations.)

Can't tell if most epic PR stunt ever or just plain stupid [0].

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/mUe6T

That's pretty funny - probably should have taken that approach with the second call rather than digging in further

Well, he's not wrong. He could certainly use a good PR agent.

The article title is not clickbait.

This is an extremely bizarre reaction for a founder who has already had successful startup experience.

Seems like a control freak who assumes the worst initially, then continually refuses to back down when corrected. It's bizarre, but it's a great example of how certain allegedly desirable traits in a founder can turn pathological.

I think even "assuming the worst" gives him too much credit, it's just irrational control freakery.

There is no requirement that you be good at what you are doing to have a successful startup. Just as the right team doing the right thing can fail by chance, the wrong team doing the wrong thing can succeed by chance.

Presumably you’d know about how the tech press works after years running a high-profile app.

If it was a newbie founder, then maybe it wouldn’t be as crazy.

I had literally never heard of HQ before reading this article, and I work in the tech / software space. This has to be the weirdest attempt at guerrilla marketing ever.

It occurs 2x a day and there are around 80k people who log on at those moments -- I don't feel this is an attempt at marketing.

Over 100k now

It's pretty hot in younger circles. I'm a "millennial" but I would imagine that it's more popular among the gen Z crowd.

It's not unusual for employees/contractors to be forbidden from speaking about their employer with reporters, at least not without clearance from PR and/or some vetting of questions and responses.

That said, this CEO's response is completely off the rails. Presumably he _didn't_ have a pre-arranged agreement or contract with Rogowsky regarding talking to reporters, and was trying to shut them up after the fact. Lame.

Just to play devil's advocate, it could have seemed to the CEO as if Rogowsky approached the media instead of the other way around, and that he was trying to gain leverage ahead of the contract renegotiation. It wouldn't surprise me if their contractor agreement / NDA covered not talking to the press.

Seems to take a real stretch of the imagination not to see the CEO as in the wrong here, though.

Assuming that was true, I'm not sure why that'd be the Daily Beast's problem. His accusation seems to be that they're doing something wrong by publishing an article or talking to an employee. The responsibility for maintaining any agreement/NDA isn't on the news outlet.

Yes, frankly I'm surprised they even cooperated enough to read him the quotes. They didn't have to.

If the reporting is faithful (big if) then Yusupov is demonstrating neurotic, paranoid and controlling tendencies. Maybe that's just his personality; if focused correctly I imagine those traits could benefit a startup's growth. Another plausible explanation: his regret over what happened to Vine after selling it to Twitter has led to obsessively avoiding any chance of making similar "mistakes".

"Generals are always fighting the last war."

I wonder if Yusupov realized that this would be the way that I and many other readers would learn about his app for the first time.

Interesting point. I'd never heard of Rus or HQ, and was only loosely familiar with Vine, but as someone who watches Jeopardy daily I'm interested enough that I'll at least test HQ out because of this.

>I wonder if Yusupov realized that this would be the way that I and many other readers would learn about his app for the first time.

My thoughts exactly. The CEO's threat to fire the host is the only reason I'm now aware of the existence of the app, the company, or the host.

This CEO needs to Google "Streisand effect"

Unless that is actual what he wants. Sounds like this contractor (no employee?) is critical to the company's success and firing him would be suicidal without first diversifying.

The founder/CEO comes off as absolutely unreasonable and reactionary in this article, and the title is surprisingly not clickbait (assuming everything happened as reported). It seems that startups oftentimes attract those kinds of big egos, although the brutal startup marketplace oftentimes punishes those people for their hubris.

I think the host should very carefully consider what his employment will be like with HQ if he signs a longer-term contract, the founder seems prone to huge mood swings. They need to get a publicist pronto.

I was going to do a search for this HQ app but lost interest after reading about the founder....

Oddly, this is likely to get way more press than the original interview, which seems to consist of deep revelations like "[I] enjoy making people happy and giving them the trivia they want" and "he’s had a woman ask him for a selfie while he was retrieving money from an ATM".

This article introduced me to HQ trivia which I just installed.

Looks like a marketing ploy by a company which is comfortable being meta. The headlines giveaway what it is.

Is this a bizarre PR stunt?

Maybe the CEO is just overly paranoid and controlling after seeing what happened to Vine.

If it is, it's still stupid. As other commenters in this thread have mentioned, he has exposed the fact that his star is a contractor, and opened up the possibility of a competitor essentially hiring away his product.

Yes, this story has introduced a whole bunch of new people to HQ. But it's also reinforced how important Scott is to their product. Not a good position to put yourself in.

Another inductee to the Silicon Valley asshole CEO hall of fame. It's getting a bit full now don't you think? They say there is no such thing as bad press, but I still don't want this app. Hope the presenter scores a Netflix deal as others have said.

So he threatens to fire his top talent, freeing him to go to work for the first guy with some cash and the willingness to knock off this trivial app? (No pun intended) I’m not buying that. Nor his solicitation for a PR agent.

This CEO just might be taking the Donald Trump approach to publicity. I had never heard of HQ trivia but from this article it sounds fun and I just installed the app and signed up. Mission accomplished?

what a bizarre, disproportionate response over an article that's basically a lighthearted character-sketch

i can't imagine what the relationship between Scott and the startup founders is like right now

Someone please teach Rus Yusupov how to think about the media and relate to the press. This is embarrassing. He did himself so much more harm than any profile could have done...

Why is he owed that? Let him fail. I loved Vine and was excited about HQ. I knew nothing about Rus until today. People like this are toxic to our culture and industry.

He's not "owed" that. It's kind of a manner of speaking. But teaching someone how to behave better removes a little of the annoyance from the world, so...

Maybe the whole thing was a publicity stunt. I had never heard of HQ before.

https://twitter.com/rus/status/933144474263339009

He since said sorry on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rus/status/933144474263339009

Sounds like Mr Yusupov is having some sort of nervous break down

Or, more likely, he's just an asshole.

I just downloaded this app to see what the hell the fuss is about. I guess it's true that no press is bad press...

My hypothesis is that they had an agreement where Scott couldn't talk to the press, but he did anyways. Since it happened the CEO just didn't know how to handle it well and was probably somewhat serious that the repercussions would be firing Scott (as the only option), something he probably didn't want to do.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I can't imagine a previously successful founder doing something so stupid. Is this a "any PR is good PR" stunt? I've certainly never heard of HQ before this, and this story is crazy enough to go viral and reach millions of people.

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