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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Having skimmed through that incoherent babbling rant, I know as a founder I will never want to do business with that guy.

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He tries to come off as some sort of "angel from the hood". I wouldn't be surprised to hear him say "yo boyyyyy, I be funding companiez."

His money's as green as the next guy's though.

Then I'm sure founders wouldn't have a problem taking the next guys money instead.

Dave has been watching too much of The Wire

If Birdman got into angel investing, I would take his money.

Honestly the biggest problem with Silicon Valley is that 90% of the startups aren't trying to build real businesses, they're just trying to build something that will impress Mike Arrington to compensate for the fact that they had no friends in high school or whatever. At least Dave actually understands the mechanics of leadgen, SEO, margins, and the rest of what makes a business work unlike the rest of the hacks in the valley.

Can't downvote this enough.

Really? All 90% of people who quit their job to found a startup want to do is impress Arrington? They want the same thing that any founder wants-- a combination of happy users, business success, and an exit (though there's more emphasis on the exit for a lot of Valley folks).

Save your venom for people who don't have the guts to start a company. Or better yet, save your venom entirely. The internet doesn't need any more.

Save your venom entirely. The internet doesn't need any more

That's one of the best things I've read in a long time.

"They want the same thing that any founder wants-- a combination of happy users, business success, and an exit."

I'm sure the founders think that's what they want, but their actions say otherwise. Anyway I didn't mean it to be venomous, I was just trying to defend Dave.

Would you provide us five specific examples of how their actions say otherwise? Since 90% of startups exhibit this kind of behavior, it should be easy to come up with five.

If I were to start calling out individual companies I'd only do it on my blog under my real name, not as a pseudonymous blog comment. As it stands though I wouldn't feel comfortable blogging this only because it's not my idea, I stole it from someone else.

So you're just impersonating Alex Krupp?

It was difficult for me to read this too; I have a really hard time reading multi-colored text with italics and underlines and font size differences. It kind of reminds me of highschool myspace accounts where GiRlS wOuLd tYpE lYkE ThIs.

I find it hard to believe that a grown adult can write like that. The whole thing was formatted and written like a MySpace bulletin from a high school kid circa 2004. Obviously the man is good at what he does but there is something to be said for tactfully dealing with problems like this.

I've reloaded this a few times, still not entirely sure it wasn't a parody of some sort. It even ends with angsty song lyrics, quoted in full. Can that really be serious? Maybe this is some kind of hybrid performance art, half a rebuttal of Arrington and simultaneously a parody of teenage LiveJournals?

To be fair I did this in middle school even though I was not a girl.

-- OxSpaZxO

The only thing missing from that post was the blinking text and the spinning email image from circa 1999.

and a marquee.

What no hits counter?

It was under construction.

Dave McClure should've hosted his website on angelfire.com

Personally, I found his babbling rant highly coherent. That's just his style. He's a really smart guy and a good investor.

Coherent, yes. And so busy, there's no time for the shift key.

I think this came in vogue among the tech affluent during the era of Crackberry supremacy -- easier to just thumb in all lowercase, and a significant portion of communication done from that device made staccato lowercase brevity socially acceptable.

What about the constant changes in font style and color? Pretty sure that took more effort than hitting the shift key would have.

Didn't mean this particular piece.

I was referring to the style of all lowercase, and to when I started noticing business people stop using initial caps. I used to catch myself doing it too after using a Sidekick and Moto Q for email on the go; still happens sometimes.

who doesn't want to be like ee cummings

It looks like an import from MS Word to me.

Not enough redundant font tags...

BlackBerries automatically capitalize the first letter after a period, so that theory doesn't really hold.

But you type in all lowercase (correct?), so typing:

the quick brown fox...

would turn into

The quick brown fox...

which would not translate to the PC. It would just stay lowercase.

Are you really comparing typing on a PC keyboard to typing on a BlackBerry? My thumbs can only "type" so fast, but sitting at a keyboard I'm somewhere around 100 wpm. It feels like two completely different activities. At a keyboard, capitalization happens automatically without me even thinking about it.

It's not a matter of bad habit, it's a conscious choice. When I'm IM'ing with friends, I typically type all lowercase (but with good spelling and punctuation) because it's what they do and it seems less formal. When I'm typing an email or an HN comment, the capitalization just happens.

They also capitalize if you hold the key down briefly.

... I miss my blackberry.

This post is a prime example of how awful a lot of tech writing is on the Web in general. I can think of book reports written by kids in public schools that feature better narrative, grammar, and spelling. Reading this made me want to stab myself.

The web is horizontal; one of the biggest problem with it is the lack of established hierarchy.

that is its biggest advantage.

better narrative, grammar, and spelling

Doh, in school you get brownie points for spelling right.

In business as an investor, you don't.

Arguably correct spelling and grammar and punctuation matters more in business where it actually affects credibility, rather than a silly letter grade between you and your teacher.

Depends on the context. For a VC who has built a style around misspelling and weirdly styled blog posts, those rules don't apply. We don't do spell check or grammar check on rap lyrics because those rules don't apply.

Food for thought: When wading through 100s of resumes, I do use frequent spelling/grammar errors to help me cull...

Investors don't usually have to pass around their resumes like a typical job applicant.

Then you obviously haven't heard of Dave before this and are judging his business acumen by his writing style. Dave is an extremely smart (enough for inDinero, Twilio, and KISSmetrics to have him as an angel investor) and well-connected guy with an eccentric writing style.

His punctuation and capitalization could be called eccentric. His writing style is a cliché, a bad one, that reinforces Arrington's point and undermines his own. For a blog post that purports to say, "Nothing is wrong here, just fair play and good capitalism," he shouldn't have adopted a style that, in fiction at least, always means, "This is a morally blinkered guy who needs to be reined in by the law, because he will never admit to seeing anything wrong with anything that gets him ahead."

I admit I don't know anything about him and very little about the issue at hand; I'm just talking about style. I find it fascinating that he would model his blog persona after (in approximately equal parts) Gordon Gekko, Colonel Jessup, and Jay of Jay and Silent Bob. I mean, really, why would you adopt a personal style that is universally understood as shorthand for "arrogant and morally compromised asshole?" And if you did, why would you deny wrongdoing in a tone that signals to readers that you're incapable of caring or acknowledging if what you're doing is wrong? I'm not presuming guilt; you don't have to be evil to find classic movie villains like Gordon Gekko charismatic or even inspiring. It's just odd that he is apparently cultivating Arrington's story instead of defusing it. Could he be doing it on purpose? Does he relish the assumption that he's an evil mastermind? Or could there be a more boring financial motivation for it?

>And if you did, why would you deny wrongdoing in a tone that signals to readers that you're incapable of caring or acknowledging if what you're doing is wrong?

Because if he were to go ahead and write a mild-mannered piece about the collusion at that meeting or the lack thereof, those who know Dave and his variegated rants on his blog would see that as something out of the ordinary. He has pretty strong opinions, and they're converted from intensity to hex values.

That's kind of his style. He knows that people will go to his blog and think "wow, this guy's unprofessional," but that, too, is part of it.

A counterpoint from a comment on the blog post:

I'm not any more convinced it was innocent just because you say motherfucker as much as I do.

Don't be quick to judge. Lay back and make reasonable decision based on data not on writing. Look at the number of companies the investor has made successful.

Sometimes people go into rants like this as a defense mechanism, so they are free to make correct choice, and not choice based on keeping everyone happy.

I think it's one of the biggest hindrances to being successful is trying to make everyone happy. I don't agree with the methodology, but I encourage people to dig deeper.

Look at the number of companies the investor has made successful.

How is this relevant to whether the investor was colluding?

It's not. Jwr accused Dave McClure of incoherence, not collusion.

I think the idea is that it's relevant to whether or not he's a good investor, notwithstanding his writing style.

"innovation & investing is not about price. it's about finding great entrepreneurs to build solid companies, and solve customer problems"

That's the reason why I WOULD DO BUSINESS with Dave.

Anyone who as followed Dave even remotely over the past half decade will understand and appreciate his style.

He says it as it is and that rare candour is something special in the venture capital business.

That's a shame, because Dave is one of the charter members of the PayPal Mafia and one of the top angels in Silicon Valley, has an extremely impressive CV and by all accounts a great guy.[1]

He was director of marketing for PayPal, and he know exactly what he's doing in writing like that. Frankly, I think his writing is hilarious.

Please, this is Hacker News, disagree with the substance of his thoughts, not his style of communication[2].

ref:

[1] http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/about-dave-mcclure.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

The style is a reflection of the substance. The style reflects the thought process and the concrete representation of thought as expressed in writing. The (mis)use of the English language by Dave is reprehensible and abhorrent and has no place in professional discourse.

If that page is any indication, it sounds like he was just lucky enough to be hanging around the building when the money truck came by. I wouldn't put him charge of marketing dog food.

I agree. The author comes across more as a midshipman in the US Navy talking with a fellow enlistee rather than as a professional. As an entrepreneur, I would not want to have as an investor someone who thinks in the terms that his writing reflects. Life is too short. Others have similar or better qualifications and are more pleasant to deal with. I would prefer someone who comes across as being more "bien eleve."

You must really appreciate form over substance then. The ideas expressed are right on and favorable to the entrepreneur - guys like Dave are forcing all investors to deal with entrepreneurs on more equal terms, if only by providing them more options.

this has to be the ugliest blog post ever, especially coming from a hardass like Dave. +1 nphase. Who writes like this? - I don't care who you are, how much money you have, what companies you've helped...his writing stands on its own, very poorly written.

Well, if am not wrong he was an early investor in mint.com. And he has some interesting insights about startup metrics (google AAARR metrics). The rant on the post is his signature style

It's his style. He is a pretty smart guy and writes a bit better in most of his other posts.

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