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I think this is an overly cynical take on things.

Consider the fact that if Ammon had fully considered this rollout, it would be very obvious to him that this would be the response. The legal ramifications would also have been obvious.

I think the only reasonable explanation is that it wasn’t fully thought through. I think his business being hit hard by the pandemic is a reasonable explanation for that. There’s no way TripleByte isn’t hit hard by this. Rushing a major feature out is exactly the kind of thing he’s supposed to be doing right now. It seems he just thought too much on making the business and tech side of the feature successful, and didn’t give enough time to the human and legal side of it.

Personally I thought his email was way more introspective and revealing than it even needed to be, and I think he’s being genuine.

I don't know Ammon, but I don't think he's chasing "big money".

The best founders I know, when they make mistakes like this, aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because they are trying to create the world they want to see exist, and that blinds them a bit. In this case, I genuinely believe Triplebyte just wanted to have a bigger impact on the hiring world, and try to fix it for engineers. Did they fuck up badly? Oh yeah. But I don't think it was for "money".

Triplebyte has 33 employees. They don't have VPs getting "fat bonuses". They don't have "golden parachutes". Look at their about page (https://triplebyte.com/about), it's all engineers and designers and CSMs. They're just a group of people doing their best to try to fix something we all hate (technical interviewing/hiring).

Triplebyte wants to go toe to toe with LinkedIn profiles and take the gatekeeper throne from it. Once it has the throne it can do anything, forget about fixing the world.

I interviewed with Ammon when the founders were running interviews themselves, and after a not-great interview he still stuck around with a junior to just talk tech for a good while. He left a really positive impression on me.

I see them as mission driven, this was a bad step but I trust that they're still focused on trying to fix a broken hiring system.

> When the dust settles, he'll give this idea another try.

This was my reaction when the word "feature" was still used in the apology. If it creates risk or user unhappiness, we call it a bug, not a feature. It's like calling mitigations for spectre from Intel a "generous rollback of performance features".

> Basically, he should've created a clueless VP of business relations or something of that sort

reminded by of the Gervais principle which I learned about from this nice article

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The feature is public profiles, and I for one think it’s a neat idea to make a better alternative to LinkedIn for developers. This whole mess was not about the feature, but the way it was going to be rolled out at short notice to everybody who hadn’t explicitly turned it off, which is very different. I think Ammon himself put it best:

> I still believe there's a need for something like this. But to release it as a default public feature was not just a major mistake, it was a betrayal.

Wait, so he’s following the classic playbook about how to screw over your users and get away with it, but he also forgot to read and follow the part where he gets away with it?

Isn’t it more likely that he just made a mistake, realized it, and apologized? You can reject the apology, of course, but it doesn’t seem like you have any evidence that it’s not genuine. In fact, the evidence you claim (“classic playbook”) you then invalidate immediately after (“he clearly forgot half the playbook”).

If someone makes a mistake, is there just nothing they can do to ever convince you it was not pure maliciousness? It seems like even an apology is then taken as evidence of ill intent. Why would anyone ever reverse course or apologize under your view?

Often, the driving force of such moves is not the founders, but investors: the company accepted a generous investment in past and had to sign a contract where the investor may wind up the company if the returns are low. In other words, it could be that Ammon was given a choice: triple profits by end of year or sell his share.

Regarding your question. Mistakes and apologies are words from the lexicon of normal emotional people. Companies, on the other hand, are soulless profit driven maniacs and their lexicon has words justifiable, plausible and profitable. When a company gives an apology, it's because it deems this combination of words the most efficient way to influence its user base and minimize damage (to profits) just done. People who run companies usually embrace this mindset if they want to get rich.

> it could be that Ammon was given a choice: triple profits by end of year or sell his share

That seems unbelievably unlikely.

Pardon my ignorance, but what insight or experience leads you to this conclusion?

Venture capital is quite the opposite of passive investing. I guess everyone on here is well aware investors are not doing it for fun but first and foremost for protecting and, ideally, multiplying their assets.

Are you in a position where you have been offered this? No founder I know has.

I doubt many VCs would see swapping out a founder as improving the outlook of the company, particularly when the issue is the general macroeconomic situation rather than an issue with the founder. Founders are a huge part of the valuation of a company - they've spent years learning their market and how to build/run their company. Once a company hits a certain size, you'll see professional CEOs brought on sometimes, but I would think Triplebyte is too small for that. At ~30 people would the company even survive founders being replaced by VCs?

VCs also like to be able to attract the best founders by being 'founder-friendly' and replacing a founder hurts that image. Starting a company is hard enough - you don't really want investors who add to the pressure.

From what I've heard, COVID seems to have stopped new investments (outside of companies that have gotten a boost from COVID) so that VCs can focus on their existing portfolios.

I think the reason why this seems more likely to be malice is because the CEO's initial reaction to the backlash was not to listen to and understand the feedback, but to repeatedly try and justify their actions. To go from commenting all over hacker news about how you aren't doing anything wrong, to sending out an email completely reversing your decision a couple days later, makes it seem like the apology was more motivated by trying to do damage control rather than genuinely thinking their actions were wrong.

I was on the original thread. He made a few comments over the course of a couple hours, if that. He wasn’t “all over Hacker News”.

You're right that the CEO wasn't “all over Hacker News”.

But the parent is indeed correct in implying that the comments he did make were anything but receptive or conciliatory.

Right, but that seems completely in keeping with his version of events. They announce this is coming without much consideration and then later he finds himself under scathing attack from HN, reacts badly and leaves some defensive comments, then takes a couple days to think about it, realizes he was wrong, writes a very good apology email.

That all makes sense, this isn’t the end of the world, can we just move on, please?

Yea that's fair

He did the next best thing outside of not releasing the feature in the first place. Credit to him, many companies would double down or ignore HN (a very small community relative to Triplebyte's userbase) completely.

I agree with you, although I think the opposite is true about the size. I imagine Triplebyte is a small subset of HN's userbase.

I created an account back in mid-2018, when I wasn't exactly happy with my employment situation. I didn't use Triplebyte to interview anywhere, but I left my personal information on the site. Fast forward to the present, I now work for a different company where I am actually happy. The post on Friday didn't sit right with me, and neither did the obtuse response by the CEO. I wouldn't like my profile to suddenly show up in a job hunting site.

But, the damage is done. I ended up deleting my account over the weekend. The process to do so wasn't as convoluted as some said it would be, it only took 1 hour.

P.S. I didn't receive the apology letter, so at least I got taken off the mailing list.

In your hypothetical narrative I would say that Triplebyte's investors would be the Machiavellian operators setting up a situation where they stand to gain from the company's risk and be shielded should it go badly. After all, investors in high growth companies are looking for one or two massive wins out of a portfolio of numerous companies and can justify such risks. The founder and CEO of such a company doesn't have the same risk profile since all of their eggs are in one basket.

To be clear, I don't have any reason to believe that this is what happened and I think such narratives are more appropriate for works of fiction. Reality is far messier.

Your critique is a weird way of saying “they could have done worse.”