1 year ago: living with no heat, no electricity - in the middle of a crime scene | Hacker News Reader

1 year ago: living with no heat, no electricity - in the middle of a crime scene

tommy.authpad.com

38 pointstomasien16 comments

Seeing how this is Ycombinator, I should have expected this to be about a start up; however, I can't help but feel I was slightly mislead by the title.

Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn interesting and I'm willing to wager that's the reason most people clicked on the link.

I'm sorry if you feel misled: that story is, in and of itself, pretty damn interesting. It may seem short sighted and even a little crazy, but when I think about all that stuff, I really do think about it in the context of "what did it mean for me as a founder" as much as "what did it tell me about life".

Fair enough, point taken. :-)

Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn interesting

I, too, would like to hear about this stuff!

Umm, did we read the same thing? It said in the robbery... his roommate was shot leading to blood on the walls and his apartment becoming a crime scene.

no electricity or heat was from having no money.

retric is largely right. I tried not to just write the sob story and get to the lesson, but maybe I should have included more details. I'll write that whole story out one day, but honestly that would be a book and would take a better writer than me to tell it.

The depths of everything that happened in October 2011 to The City Swig guys are just. They are fucking shocking. It was quite a time.

Do you think that ABC boards in other states will come to the same conclusion about the concept behind CitySwig (helping connect bar and store owners with stock to sell at discount with customers)? I commented on what on your previous posts that I think CitySwig a really good idea, and I still think so. I'm curious what direction you are taking now.

1. No. There are about 35 states where TCS could work relatively uninhibited. Our flash deals model is something bars want very badly and I believe strongly someone will get it right.

2. We built too many features. The app was too feature rich and we couldn't iterate fast enough. That said, with a solid seed round we would move into other states and start killing it with the news apps we've finished (but haven't released).

However, investors don't care about that, it's too unknown and our model would take a long time to scale. I fully support and understand their perspective, and I wish we could have done what we needed to do in Virginia to prove them wrong. We couldn't, and now we're going to move on with something else we're really excited about.

Came for gory details, stayed for the warm and fuzzies.

For every startup that has a nice clear run at it I imagine there's a dozen swimming in poop. In some cases, like this one, going through the worst possible circumstances that can happen, and you either sink or swim.

I think I wrote this badly, but you got exactly the point I was going for: for every Airbnb there's someone exactly as resilient that is NOT Airbnb.

However, not dying has its own merits and has huge upside, so I recommend adopting it as a philosophy and constantly doing everything you can to turn "not dying" into "living large".

Absolutely. Falling to the deepest depths and surviving has the side effect of making you more fearless, and thus stronger.

Can you describe exactly what is "Virginia's ABC"? And how were they able to shut you down? That part of the story was completely lost on me - I feel like there is some context that I might have missed.

That's harsh. I thought "don't die" was strictly metaphorical. You did it most literally as well. I'd like to hear more about your troubles with ABC.

Stay strong.

Thanks man, we will!

What did PG mean when he said "go to your users"?

There's no lesson here... people already work hard to stay alive, and serious tenacity is a well-known component to getting a business off the ground.

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