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Comment by jbail | Hacker News Reader

How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?

Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.

Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.

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When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.

Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.

I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.

What about making this a non-profit, run by a board?

Different idea, but, for example Matt M. created the WordPress Foundation to independently carry out the things he believed in.

http://wordpressfoundation.org/

Yes. I love this idea. Right now I have to focus on coding, but this will be necessary down the road.

Might help in the event that something happens to both of you and users are left on a ghost ship of sorts.

Apparently, that "independent" WordPress Foundation is still just Matt:

"From an ultimate decision-making point of view, the Foundation is mainly just me. [...] It’s worth noting that the Foundation was created purely to be a trademark and IP holding entity that Automattic could transfer its ownership of the WordPress trademark to. There are no “members.”" [0]

[0] http://wpkrauts.com/2013/leaders-and-the-greater-good/#comme...

Without digging into the specifics of the matter,if the Foundation is indeed a 501(c)(3), the IRS should/will almost certainly have required it to have three independent board members.

In addition, having counseled clients on this structure, the benefit of creating a nonprofit and giving it IP is that it creates a public check on anything to do with that IP. For example, while a startup's founders can sell the company, they can't unilaterally agree to sell off the IP in the nonprofit, and the public can challenge any such sales by recourse to a state attorney general's office.

It's not perfect, but it helps protect the IP in the way founders want to. In many ways, it's a one-way decision, which is why it works.

(Yes, IAAL.)

On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt it will be awesome.

But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.

> and you then left and moved onto other projects

And now he wants to work on something like Posterous again. His priorities don't seem so shifty.

Thanks jbail -- I don't want to dig up the past, but the truth of the matter was I didn't agree with my cofounder on the direction of Posterous, but I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in. It was one of the most painful experiences to have to walk away from my baby.

I think we're put on this earth to create things of great lasting value that are good for others around us. Many things in our lives will change, but I believe this one is a constant guiding light.

> I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in

Support him? By bailing out? Was it easy for your cofounder to replace your skillset? Would love to hear the whole story if you don't mind, it could help help others who are in similar situations. It's sad that cofounders who once created something together are not able to find a common understanding in later stages. Sad that both parties reached that point where they have to utter the threat either my way or I leave. WTF. I know this is common and probably the reason why most startups fail but just leaving (or maybe the true story was different) sounds a bit strange. However, maybe it was the best decision for the organization.

>Support him? By bailing out?

Support him BEFORE he bailed out. Ie. he supported the VC thing, although he didn't like the direction.

As for the "skill-set", it's not as if building a web service, and such as simple one as posterous (or twitter, or tumblr) is rocket science.

Scaling it is a little harder, but still, thousands of companies and websites do it on their own. So what What ireplaceable skillset?

garry, I hope you wont let armchair quarterbacks deter you in any way from pursing your ideas.

since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".

second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations because it separates the s. ie, it's not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide.

You might as well use the unambiguous form, though. (And what do you do with possessives, as in "CDs' sizes"?)

Because many people using HN are learning English as a second language, one should avoid dispensing bad writing advice.

The apostrophe is for possessives and contractions. Pluralization is neither.

Wrong: Greatest Hits of the 90's / The 90's' Greatest Hits / 1990's' Greatest Hits

Right: Greatest Hits of the 90s / The 90s' Greatest Hits / 1990's Greatest Hits

It's easy if you think of the difference between the plural and possessive "s" using the unabbreviated word:

Television's favorite stars are always on our televisions.

TV's favorite stars are always on our TVs.

Any style guide that writes that sentence a different way is simply wrong.

...one should avoid dispensing bad writing advice

I think you are being a bit hard on tedunangst since his statement "Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred..." applies in situations different from your examples.

For example: "The Times (and some other publications, including the Chicago Manual of Style) do call for using an apostrophe in the plural of abbreviations that include periods."

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/faqs-on-st...

You can find more discussion here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Representing_plurals_an...

By both those references, it's "URLs", not "URL's".

rubyrescue: since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".

tedunangst: Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations ... not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide

tedunangst claimed that was a style choice. It's not. By all these guides, "URL's" is wrong, and is something that would be corrected by editors using your examples of NYT or Chicago Manual of Style.

Also, for the periods, omitting the periods is often the cleanest answer. Instead of "C.P.A.'s" which is both ambiguous and ugly, consider "I went to my CPA's office. Naturally, it was full of CPAs."

You're safest following this line from your Wikipedia link: The MLA is explicit "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation". The APA is specific in "without an apostrophe".

This is one of the first features we will be launching in the next two weeks: Posterous import. This is a high priority as I have years of data on there as well. We're putting the finishing touches on it as we speak.

OT: "grocer's apostrophe" -- never heard someone use that phrase, and I really like it. I see that all the time, and it makes my skin itch. I will be borrowing it frequently.

We both wanted hyper growth. We both wanted venture funding. We both wanted a lasting company. It's not easy and I didn't quit.

I built a team. Accountability and execution in the company. It's not as easy as it sounds.

We made mistakes and learned. I think everyone did well and are on to great things.

Out of curiosity, where will you be moving the blog hosted at http://sachin.posterous.com/?

> When I started working on Posterous in 2008 ..

Just wondering: how can somebody start again something he worked already years on? I understand that you might learned a lot with Posterous and now you'd like to just employ that knowledge in a new blog project. But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years? You could loose time and after ten years looking back and you pity that you just worked only on blog systems. I don't want to talk blogs down, they are a very interesting use case and I still think there's room for improvement but in terms of spreading the bets and just the need to start something totally new I am a bit confused that you do the same thing over and over again (and I didn't see any disruptive feature or new angle with Posthaven).

It worked for Foursquare. If I recall correctly, they had sold Dodgeball to Google then turned around and created the exact same product.

Can I propose (not too seriously) that a fifth hour each week be set aside for proof reading? ;)

>But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years?

Hhh? Most people work on the same thing their whole life.

And it's not like this will be the exact same thing as Posterous was.

The only exchange I've had with one of the founders (Garry) was on Twitter when a YC company named SnapJoy launched a campaign to "free your photos" from Flickr.

The only problem was that SnapJoy was a bigger black hole than Flickr was. An API to access your photos was coming soon for months and never came before they were acquired by Dropbox.

Somehow he was arguing around that point. Unsure how but it couldn't possibly have made sense.

I have nothing against Garry or anyone else involved in these projects/companies but it goes a long way to hurt those of us [1] trying to build software where users actually control and retain ownership of their data.

[1] I founded The OpenPhoto Project in 2011

https://github.com/photo

http://theopenphotoproject.org

the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service

Seriously? Just gonna throw 'em under the bus like that? Friends like these..

Its time to stop trotting out this meme that the alternative to an "aquihire" was a sustainable business. Sometimes you've got to fish or cut bait.

Ad hominem aside, trust should never be required for a good agreement. PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell. If they follow that up with e.g., transferring control of posthaven.com to a well-regarded foundation like Wikimedia, the EFF, or archive.org they could further remove the trust requirement from the contract they are forming with their users. That'd be great.

There's nothing wrong with selling out. I assume Posterous was founded to make a profit at some point and selling out allowed them to do that. I'm actually 100% okay with that. I was merely calling out that "never selling out" is a strange proposal coming from someone with a track record for selling out...on the day that this former sold out service announces it is shutting down forever.

It might just be bad timing to announce the next project more than anything.

According to Garry [1], they had no idea that Twitter would make the announcement today, so the bad timing seems coincidental.

[1] https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/302558780447682560

> PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell.

Just like OkCupid's intensive, well-researched, data-driven post on why online dating needs to be free scared off Match.com from acquiring them?

Okcupid still is free.

What the hell are Wikimedia, the EFF or archive.org going to do with a blog hoster?

Idk, but people really need to stop hyping this. It's just some company hosting _blogs_ get over yourself.

WMF or EFF, I dunno, but the Internet Archive has plenty of interest in large sets of blogs (much as the Library of Congress has interest in tweets).

The nifty thing, though, is that PostHaven doesn't have to wait if they are genuine in their intent! The Internet Archive offers a paid archiving service, Archive-It...

For those interested, I built http://throwww.com which is a free (and with an obvious bias) better alternative.

Hey sfard, how do i reach you?

I don't think you're being very fair. You're suggesting a false dichotomy.

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