Given that he posted the e-mail contents online and wrote it in a way to narrate the board member's own bad actions, I'm assuming the real intent to was to warn others against working with this person. He stops short of naming the difficult board member, but it wouldn't exactly be difficult to figure out who it was from all the clues.
Theoretically this would be easy to figure out if you had a yearly listing of board members which I imagine should be public, but that doesn't appear available publicly. The only listing of the board I can find is this news article [0] from 2015, but again, none of the people listed there can be definitively identified as the one being referenced.
As further evidence of how murky this is, several people in the comments below have named different people as the person being referenced. One commenter has edited their comment to change the person being accused.
If the author of this email wanted to point a finger at a specific person, they did a bad job.
[0]https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2015/01/60650-lending-club-...
However, while the lead investor companies are established, the "partners" of the lead investors listed on crunchbase do seem to fit the fresh investor note. Especially since Series B and C were 5-6 years ago.
Time to rewatch Inception.
But I strongly disagree with you.
Collaborative Fund led the Series C round. Jay Kim was a fairly fresh venture investor at the time; the model and operation of NXC/Nexon's investment arm was quite different to the traditional VC. Based off the timings, it's highly likely this is the VC who the e-mail refers to.
sounds like Craig Shapiro is the likely culprit here
[edit] Is giving the accused a platform to defend himself that unpopular of an opinion? Online shaming often gets out of hand and goes too far. I recommend this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goe...
1) Contact the accused party and ask him for a written response. By giving him the opportunity to defend himself, you get a more balanced view and decrease the likelihood of cruel & unusual punishment.
2) Out the investor in private forums where data/information that arises after the publication of this article can be fully considered. YC and many other founder networks have investor databases for this purpose.
2 - no, I disagree strongly for two reasons:
Keeping information in a quiet private forum makes it inaccessible to people at large. This means the next CEO who runs up against this investor is mostly completely unaware of their past actions.
And, honestly, hackernews is probably the single most relevant forum you could find to discuss this on - it has a general lean toward tech but it is run by ycombinator which is specifically interested in all things investment.
I agree this is the downside of my proposed approach. But, the alternative is a world where someone's reputation can be irreparably damaged by unsubstantiated claims made by one person.
Do you want to live in a world where someone's reputation and livelihood can be destroyed by unsubstantiated claims? You may think I'm overstating the potential damage, but I think people generally underestimate the damage the internet mob can inflict on a person.
I would rather live in a world where the powerful can be baselessly attacked compared to a world where the weak are unable to fairly attack them - if we need to err on one side or the other I prefer to put up with trolls and scammers.
Even without outing the investors, many founders are currently doing the necessary research to identify the investor and will blacklist him.
I think we should keep in mind that:
1) The accusations are currently unsubstantiated
2) The reputational damage to the investor is already significant and largely irreversable
3) Outing the investor here will significantly increase the reputational damage to the investor
Given the above, I really don't see how it's fair to out the investor before substantiating the accusations or giving the investor time to respond.
EDIT: left out the keyword NOT in the 1:1 comparison
I'm saying that we should keep the identifying info private until the accusations are substantiated.
The internet mob is merciless, and will very likely ruin this guy's reputation once he's outed.
By outing the guy, you are presuming him guilty and inflicting steep punishment when he could be innocent.
How do you substantiate an accusation like "you insisted on talking to me at 3AM local time after I just stepped off a plane after a 18 hour flight" (or whatever the deets are)?
In general, yes, but in this case the most convincing candidate is a billionaire. He'll be fine.
The fact that the VC isn't named, makes it difficult for them to reply in a public way and respond to some of those points.
That was the point I was trying to make:
The CEO went out of his way to make the board member as easy to identify as he could, short of spelling his name out.
I'm not suggesting that people try to reverse engineer it, but clearly the open letter was meant to be partially retaliatory and partially a warning to others in this space.
One of the funds mentioned in the wikipedia article and that also matches the description from the email removed CircleUp from their portfolio website in 2019. You can look it up on the Internet Archive.
Meanwhile the next CEO knows there's a rat, and can work out for themselves who that might be before their first 100 days are up, by which point most managers have been typecast. After that it's very hard to fully take advantage of major new insights you've had. It's an uphill battle to make major changes to your style of management.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing about, and discussing who it is and possibly who else has had the same experiences - as long as it isn’t mudslinging but a professional discussion. Similar to the letter.
Bad investors, bad board members, and even bad incubators are a dime a dozen.
Naming this 1 investor focuses the discussion on that single investor, rather than bringing awareness to the situation itself, and how commonly these things happen (yet how rarely anyone talks about it).
You should keep in mind that the investor may actually be innocent here. Imagine if the CEO was a sociopath who is both adept at manipulating public opinion and out to destroy the investor's reputation.
I'm not saying this is fact. I'm saying it's possible.
Outing the investor here will cause significant, irreparable reputational damage to the investor.
Given that the accusations are based on unsubstantiated claims, outing the investor is wrong.
Please don't underestimate the consequences of your actions. You may see it as just 'discussing some random topic on a forum'. But, doing so could be ruining an innocent person's life.
I liked someone's comment about preferring to let the focus be on Ryan's journey, and I suppose that many others here must be feeling a sense of kinship with a fellow entrepreneur as he described candidly and courageously his version of "The Struggle."
Sure, so that the lesson isn't lost, though, we may want to learn from Ryan's sobering experience and think harder about this too: Which investors we choose to collaborate with, come due-diligence time.
EDIT: #sarcasm if it wasn’t obvious.