Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

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I have questions about the OP's motivation for writing this but more on that later.

The real fault lies with both parties for not setting expectations. A lot of the requests from the founders seem very reasonable; I fully expect them to be telling their friends about this bad hire who never executed on the details for them. Neither of you seem to have done the hard work up front of conveying what you needed and expected from the other side. I can see the other side of the data points you show - weekly revenue need not be the right thing for the company, startups need detail often more often than execution and guess what, VCs do care about the actual idea. It also sounds like you were surprised by the risk profile of an early stage startup (and your notion of VC vetting might be in for a harsh reality check).

What I don't understand is this post itself - you seem to blame YC for what seems to be a typical startup experience (not raising funding is the median outcome and even folks like AirBnb struggled with this for a long, long time). I'm wondering whether the way you've constructed this post with an anonymous post on a blog, the callouts to their funding situation, etc is meant to hurt the company's future prospects by making them identifiable (and maybe take a swipe at YC too). I hope that's not the case here.

> you seem to blame YC for what seems to be a typical startup experience

Why are so many here thinking this? I didn't even remotely interpret this post like that. If anything, the post seemed to overwhelmingly present your exact same point here: that even a YC startup is in fact, just another startup. He seemed to be more concerned with giving people realistic expectations (like you are) than trying to discredit any of the entities involved.

What I don't understand is why people are so quick to attribute malice to this. Clearly there was a communication breakdown, I'm just not entirely sure where... the post felt pretty simple/clear/genuine to me.

If the author's point was in fact that "even a YC startup is in fact, just another startup," then he shouldn't have mentioned YC because in the context of the now-deleted blog post it can only serve to narrow down the candidate list of companies that the post was in reference to. That is somewhat malicious, given the sentiments expressed.

If that wasn't "overwhelmingly" the point he was trying to make, and he was in fact trying to imply that YC startups have an inherently better chance of success than "just another startup," then your comment is moot.

Malicious or not, telling the world over the Internet about bad experiences you had with co-workers probably isn't a great idea in the long run. Hash it out with them directly, or learn a personal lesson and move on.

> it can only serve to narrow down the candidate list of companies that the post was in reference to. That is somewhat malicious, given the sentiments expressed.

This seems like an awfully cynical view to take. YC has accepted quite a few startups in its lifetime (564 to be exact [1]), and he mentioned no other specificities aside from that. He could have titled it "My experience at an incubated/accelerated startup", but then there wouldn't be much of an anchor back to reality to drive it into people's heads that: 'hey, this does happen, and it could happen to you'. Not to mention that any of the other 'large' accelerators probably still pale in comparison to YC's startup numbers. Either way, trying to anchor a helpful point into reality does not seem like good evidence for maliciousness. Trying to frame another person's legitimate attempt at helping others as malicious feels more malicious.

>If that wasn't "overwhelmingly" the point he was trying to make, and he was in fact trying to imply that YC startups have an inherently better chance of success than "just another startup," then your comment is moot.

No, because that's a given. The post was talking about cultural aspects, and I in-turn was talking about cultural aspects. And thus here you are (either intentionally, or unintentionally) arguing that there is some deep correlation between a company's specific set of cultural decisions and a company's success. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that's the case.

> Malicious or not, telling the world over the Internet about bad experiences you had with co-workers probably isn't a great idea in the long run. Hash it out with them directly, or learn a personal lesson and move on.

I agree that being a bad sport and gossiping over the internet is in poor taste, but telling someone to bottle up their insights when it seems like they're trying to help other people avoid the same mistakes is just counterproductive. We live in a society and we should help eachother out. Depriving the community of potentially useful insights out of fear that you'll run into the ~0.1% (1/564 * 100) chance of accidentally gossiping about somebody is just not productive for anybody.

[1] http://www.cloudave.com/29767/y-combinators-startup-math-2/ (Granted, the number of remaining active startups is definitely less, but it is still a large number.)

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