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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I'm resisting googling this Hater app because reading the whole tale of Brendan reads like the greatest satire of the startup world, ever. But I'm afraid if I Google it I'll find out it isn't satire...

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Sometimes I wonder if there is a class of startup founders who are basically only doing what they are doing for their own personal brand building and after a few years or whatever you become semi well known enough in tech circles to parlay that into something else or an acceptance into some b-school and go back to a real job.

That's exactly the vibe I got from the "cofounder" who is Head of PR. At 2% equity and $1,500 a month, that has to be the rawest deal I have heard of for someone who is essentially responsible for all of the company's traction.

Yeah, that stood out as some serious asymmetry.

Well, "PR" is FAR from an actual growth lead. PR is a tactic within the overall marketing stable. No straight-up PR person is going to actually create, manage, and optimize growth beyond just PR.

Yeah, not sure how you live on $18k/year salary in NYC unless you're being supported by your family, which is what I'm guessing is happening here for both of them. Not many people have a network of exclusively friends and family to fund their seed round to the tune of a few $100k...

True story: I worked for OkCupid Labs a few years ago and we made "Hater Dater" as a hack project. The concept was kind of a joke, but we actually ended up extracting a useful tagging library that we used in other projects. I put a little more time into it after the Labs was closed, but never thought it worth putting _that_ much effort into. So it's amusing to see someone working on this project in earnest, with funding, when internally we couldn't get the OKC/Match/IAC resources to play with it for longer than a week (which honestly is probably the right call). Maybe the moral of the story is that life is kind of a joke?

> the moral of the story is that life is kind of a joke?

I imagine this is what all the small talk around the offices of OKC/Match/IAC is like.

The author was clearly satirizing in tone and selection of comments.

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