Color: We Are Not Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Color: We Are Not Shutting Down

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70 pointswlue38 comments

How on earth did it take over 3 hours for someone at Color or Sequoia to confirm the company is in-fact not dead? You'd think employees/founders/investors would have been tweeting like crazy to deny the rumor.

Because the last thing you want to do is have employees (even execs) shooting their mouths off in the heat of the moment and saying something stupid.

You want to regroup, figure out WTF is going on and how the rumor started, and figure out a sensible statement that is going to calm this down instead of rile it up some more.

> saying something stupid

What kind of stupid thing could you say? The company is either dissolving or it is not. Seems pretty easy to figure out.

You underestimate the power of the stupid side. In the heat of the moment you find out what good marketing folks are for.

"We're not dead! In fact, we're going to rock your world with X!!"... oops... was X a secret?

In any normal population of sufficient size you're going to have some screwball outliers.

And in any situation of sufficient gravity and chaos everyone becomes a screwball outlier.

Whether the company is dissolving or not is only tangentially related to whether they say they are dissolving or not.

Because people have work to do, rather than sitting around checking Twitter, HN, and TC all day long? It's not like something's going to happen if they don't respond ASAP. As long as they'd gotten something out by the end of they day, they'd've been fine.

Yeah, people have work to do... like the PR people whose job is to handle bad news about the company. And yes, part of their job is to monitor tech news sites like the Verge.

and then get a hold of investors to see what is going on, then wait while they figure out what is going on and tell you, then meet with management to determine a proper statement.

theoretically, could it have happened way faster? yes, but who knows how hard it was to get a hold of everybody and make sure whatever information they had was accurate. 3 hours isnt that big of a deal.

I'm guessing because it took 3 hours to find someone who knew whether the company is dead or not. Since the founder is off vacationing/thinking in exotic places, I wouldn't be surprised if the employees heard the news and assumed it to be true.

How on earth did Venture Beat run such a potentially damaging story if it may not, in fact, be true?

Well, I guess they've found the person who leaks everything to the media... It says VentureBeat confirmed the email was sent to just one person. I wonder if this was a mole hunt.

Still, Color is gash and an embarrassment to the whole industry, and its death would not be mourned by many.

Unfortunately, not giving up and willing yourself to success isn't enough to overcome an nonexistent business model.

Why waste time on frivolities like a "business model" when you can dupe investors out of $40M and spend it on a lavish office and developing a lame photo-sharing app that could have been done with $100K?

If anything makes me think we're in a bubble, it's companies like Color and the people who pump money into them.

But... with that budget how could possible afford to buy both color.com and colour.com! Withour colour.com dozens of people around in countries using British English won't be able to be confused by your app.

Color is the pets.com of the current bubble

At least people could understand what pets.com was trying to do. Color was just some abstract idea that made sense because...color.com is a cool domain?

Nevermind a business model; do they even have a product?

A similar pattern was recently in the news here: Onlive.

August 17, 2012 > OnLive lays off all employees, assets sold to new company [0]

5:20 PM - August 17, 2012 > OnLive Denies It's Shutting Down, Won't Comment on Layoffs [1]

08/20/2012 10:11:33 AM PDT > Game company OnLive reveals new details of restructuring [2]

Winding down a business might mean they are trying to orchestrate a merger or aq-hire. Or a whole host of other things. For which you would not want your name in the news (sensitive negotiations, or wat-ever).

______________________

“We don’t respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down,” OnLive said. [3]

______________________

[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176180/OnLive_lays_off_al...

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/OnLive-Shutting-Down-Layoff...

[2] http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_21351760/game-co...

[3] "Just a short while ago reports emerged that the gaming and virtual-desktop software start-up had issued pink slips to all of its employees and was effectively shutting down the service. The first part, we’re told by an OnLive spokesperson, is not the case." http://allthingsd.com/20120817/onlive-denies-reports-that-it...

[update] > http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4667217

Assuming Color's statement wasn't a lie that's some pretty shitty reporting by Venture Beat. Reporting a companies board has voted to shut it down is pretty big news and should require much more verification that one single email. Tech 'journalists' need to do a better job when reporting this sort of thing.

Absolutely. Both Color and Venture Beat have some serious debriefing to do. Assuming Color is right, a lot of damage has already been done. In that case, in (serious, non-tabloid) print journalism, the publication's reputation would be tarnished; in online journalism, it may be just the company's. Somebody sure owes the public an explanation into what exactly just happened here.

EDIT: not somebody. It's Venture Beat that owes the explanation. Either they stand by the story even if they're willing to do that without full verification, or they must apologize for jumping the gun.

I would love to see an AmA with a Color employee to get the inside scoop on what's going on there. It must be devastating for morale for a rumor to spread that everybody assumed was going to happen at some point anyway (was anybody surprised when their shutdown was announced? I didn't even bat an eye) and then have to come out and vehemently deny the rumor. And all the while the absentee CEO is galavanting around the world on some exotic "sabbatical" as his company burns to the ground. Only a matter of time until this news resurfaces again, only next time it will be for real.

My question would be: Why not?

Perhaps they're waiting for the CEO to come back from his long vacation.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that most funds are only allowed to invest capital once, so any of the $40M they get back (which I'd hope would be a somewhat large chunk) can no longer be invested.

A smarter move may be looking at and pursuing several pivots, use that 40M to create a few startups within a startup and see if you can get something started that will provide a healthy return.

Exactly, although they have a tarnished brand. They could find the most talented developer and become somewhat of a Mobile incubator. They've got a lot of deals and scale having dealt with Verizon, physical space and employees. They could use Color labs as the shell for lots of products.

That email felt weird, didn't look like an email you'd send to employees to tell them you were shutting down.

Then it's weird that the board did not go out and deny that the email was authentic at all.

As a slight aside - is it just me, or is their logo basically a rip-off of the Royal Air Force roundel?

I'm still trying to figure out how a company who has $41 million in funding and over 400K users can't seem to come up with a business plan that generates revenue.

Is this another example of buyer beware when you invest in these kinds of companies?

400K users? total registered users? surely that can't be active users.

AppData says 460,000 active monthly users[1]. The original VentureBeat article quoted AppData at 440,000, which is where the ~400,000 number is coming from.

Edit: In reply to the grandparent, because of the huge amount of money Color raised, they would need to make something like ten thousand dollars per user at their current user numbers to meet expectations. Since that's obviously impossible, it makes sense for them to avoid revenue entirely until their user numbers hit eight digits at least.

[1] http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/200067376723055-color

Definitely not active. Can't be. I signed up. Used it 5 times to get a prize from some contest (never got it) then never used it again. I mean, the idea is cool but it doesn't seem like there's much interest in real time broadcasting. There's too much information flying at us and we're all too busy to remember to tune in to our friends' video streams live or even stumble across them by accident.

I don't really like Color just because its just not my thing but I don't quite get why everyone here hates them so much. There's a lot of vitriol spraying all over the place around here. Is it because they're super hyped and overvalued? I hate to break it to everyone if it is but most startups we read about here are overhyped and over valued. I don't get it. Seriously, I mean I get why people don't like Color but why does it seem everyone just hates them pretty severely around here?

I bet color is getting way more traffic than normal with this stuff.

In other news, Paris Hilton stated "I'm not quitting"

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