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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

This is going in the middlebrow dismissal corpus.

(I don't plan to mention that every time I find a new one, but this is the most perfect example I've found since I thought of trying to detect them algorithmically.)

If a 3.25b valuation at Square's age is a huge miss, all but a handful of companies in history have missed worse.

Do you actually know anything about Square's "PR machine," or are you just assuming he has one because he's in the press a lot? I don't know myself whether for example they have an in-house group that does aggressive outbound PR, or whether they have an outside PR firm, or both, or neither. It's possible the answer is neither; I get mentioned in the press a lot, and YC has neither.

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Hi pg. Like I said, my evaluation is opinion and yours carries a lot more weight than mine, so I'd love any insight you have. Maybe I've got something wrong in my analysis.

Do you feel that Square's raise was successful even though it was a lower amount at a lower valuation than it anticipated? Maybe not a huge miss, but that seems like a miss to me. Thoughts?

(PS: I am using the term miss in terms of raise/valuation, not in terms of company success).

As for PR, having worked hard to get press both with PR and without, I feel like I have a sense of when it is being used and when it is not. In this case, Dorsey's coverage seems extraneous, flashy, and sometimes out of nowhere. Why are there so many articles about him and Square from so many publications seemingly all the time? Why all this hype around someone that, while immensely impressive, is still only one of a large number of people doing amazing things? Why do we not see so many articles on Elon Musk and Space-X from every magazine on the planet? I can't seem to go a day without seeing a profile of Dorsey or about Square. Feels to me like a very well calculated PR plan. Again, I may be wrong and would appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks and sorry for the entrance into the dismissal corpus. Promise to do my best to stay out of there in the future.

Some companies go public on the stock market and don't even raise 200m of cash. To raise 200m in VC capital alone is an enormous task. As for PR, people love public figures and leaders. They want to associate with the individual strife to the top! It makes for an incredible story about your product/service and this is what you want to do. You want to strike an emotion with your users!

Well, a few things about your analysis.

First, raising capital and going public are two entirely different things. One is generally an exit event and the other is not. One garners returns for your investors and the other does not. Square is raising operating capital to continue operations, not selling itself publicly to create returns for previous investors. I would be much, much more impressed to see Square go public than raise any amount of money. Or much more impressed with a company that raised $0 going public.

Big rounds aren't what matters when I say miss. What matters is that Square was not able to raise at the valuation it wanted and what that signals regarding their internal finances and the valley's investment community in general (and even beyond since Square raised from companies outside SV).

And yes, Square/Dorsey seem to strike a great emotional nerve, but that's my point. That's not by accident. That's very carefully crafted marketing. And to get as much coverage as they do, they probably spend an enormous amount on internal or external PR. It's all carefully crafted to tell exactly the story that Square wants us to hear.

Dorsey's PR has been mentioned in a number of articles. IIRC Vanity Fair was one, can't remember the other but the PR guy butt in during a coffeeshop interview. They are never more than a few feet away, and make sure articles mention that he wears Prada, dates models, and likes the expensive things in life. It's clear from miles away that Dorsey's image, and hence square is a highly managed affair.

So yes, we know a bit about Square and Dorsey's PR machine, it's been reported on in the press a number of times.

Thanks for the detailed clarification!

I hope your corpus includes all the metadata.

These will be a lot easier to detect by who is upvoting/downvoting rather than by looking at the text, of course. I mention this because the term "corpus" usually refers to a body of text, whereas the metadata here is the gold.

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