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Comment by anotherfounder | Hacker News Reader

https://www.atrium.co/inside-atrium/the-future-of-atrium/

For someone who has spent so much telling founders to cut buzzwords and speak in plain and simple English, this blog post by Justin Kan is something special. Case in point:

> Similarly, at Atrium, we’ve made the tough decision to restructure the company to accommodate growth into new business services through our existing professional services network.

Simple facts hidden in positive-sounding buzzwords, as if, they believe that the reader doesn't know better. It seems like a variation of 'Our incredible journey..' template

Honest question, why do companies do this? It seems disrespectful to everyone - employees (both fired and current), customers, and any adult for that matter.

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Culture and risk avoidance. It seems a safe way to frame things because others have did it that way before and the author can't remember anything bad happening to them.

American business communication, especially when addressing mass audiences, has its own special modes. I find a lot of it gross, and I'm a native.

I will say, ability to cut the nonsense is definitely a positive distinguishing factor when interviewing, but that's hit or miss; there are lots of smart, decent people with whom I just don't "click" and I imagine that's the case for most folks.

>Honest question, why do companies do this? It seems disrespectful to everyone - employees (both fired and current), customers, and any adult for that matter.

generally because it keeps the person who wrote it hire-able post closure, and makes those that lost money or effort on the deal feel as if their loss is actually being spun into something else, like concepts, innovation, future profitable IP, whatever.

I agree, I think it's disrespectful, but then again there's a lot about business that I feel that way towards.

He got the same feedback on his accompanying tweet https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1216896251754450946?s=2...

Bigger red flag from his tweet is there’s basically zero engagement from others in the tech community. For someone who is that high profile to tweet something big about his startup and get almost no responses is really strange.

That does seem super strange. Any ideas why that might be the case? Most of his day-to-day tweets seem to get a pretty solid amount of interaction.

This tweet from December 10 seems pretty weird now: Justin Kan @justinkan "Early-stage fundraising: - need a great narrative - can get by with bad metrics - but MUST know those metrics"

Digging deeper on Twitter there’s a ton of pissed off lawyers (obviously including the laid off ones) and customers who both felt blind-sided.

The corporate legalese speak made things worse, of course.

I guess I underestimated the anger this would cause, so makes sense people are not going to touch it.

I’m not sure the author is giving much consideration to the critical thinking skills of the public—- that’s more of a big company CEO thing. A lot of founders are genuinely happy to escape a failure and are already emotionally in the future by the time the blog gets written. Save the stress for the next thing.

And this is Justin Kan. Not somebody who ruminates, and somebody who went through a ton of pivots with Justin TV. This sort of result is no big deal to somebody like him.

Wait. Is that the guy I remember seeing forever ago first person streaming his life for a while?

Yep he did that.

At CES a Ford EV on display had this printed on its window "Doors are locked for your protection". Instead of being honest and saying "it's an early prototype"

Not to get side tracked with galling examples of Corp speak but a grocery store in Seattle has these signs that read,”please allow us to help you at another register” where it used to say “lane closed” or simply “closed”.

I’m not sure why this is bad - they directly inform you of the action you need to take.

You could even imagine a case where the lane was closed to customers but perhaps in use for a training. This sign would avoid confusion, whereas a ‘closed’ sign would invite answers.

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