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Comment by hoppp | Hacker News Reader

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Were the thousands of commits and hundreds of feature branches over the last 9 months just to keep up appearances, then? Were the 850 people who forked it in on the scheme, too?

Well.. if that's it it's not really much to shown for if you spent $7 million on it.

It's not even clear they spent all the money. Maybe it just wasn't a viable product.

Yeah exactly. We didn't spend the majority of it.

Did Claude make the commits and branches?

(Honestly I don’t think so here, but I predict that will happen eventually)

Sometimes things just fail.

Do you understand that when you raise money it doesn't go into your personal account? Its not like you can move this money in your retirement account and sail into the sunset.

You can call it a bait but where is VCs due diligence for this. Most VCs where out there defending their infra layers investment. Just look at YC batches and see the inflated number of infra startups.

Right? I’ve been through due diligence and it’s neither a quick nor simple process, even for seed.

A great way to launder money then?

Which step of “VC firm with millions to invest” and “fresh grads blow millions on AWS bills, sushi delivery and ketamine” is dirty money being washed?

"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"!

The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault.

It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there.

While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent.

Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.

That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.

Are there cases when VC investors actually went after founders for fraud or embezzlement or misrepresenting the business or something like that?

At least the repo is still available. Anyone can fork and carry on, create a community, etc.

If the creators could not do anything with it after raising funds, then why is it expected that somebody will fix it for free?

Forking only makes sense if the creators are also monetising it successfully.

If people are complaining then it means that they must've found it to be of value. If they found it to be valuable enough that they really want work done on it again, they can always do that work themselves (or hire someone to). There is 0 connection between forking and successful monetization.

Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?

In response to sibling: > It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want

Yes, that's exactly what it means!

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