The Fall of Vidoop - Chris Messina's history with an OpenID startup | Hacker News Reader

The Fall of Vidoop - Chris Messina's history with an OpenID startup

factoryjoe.com

23 pointsturoczy8 comments

This past March, I paid my own way to SXSW. Meanwhile, Vidoop picked up travel for Kveton (by now some kind of VP of Open Technologies), Sontag, Matt Selbie (VP of Marketing), and Scott Blomqist (CTO) who all shacked up in some sweet pad somewhere outside downtown Austin.

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I’m writing this post not because I’m bitter — most startups fail and I knew this when I joined the company [...]

Seems more like that your typical consumer security / authentication company is going to fail when it pays for four key employees to go to SXSW, especially when it's in dire financial straits.

Vidoop had been playing for a while in the identity space and was still flirting with it at this time. Part of the entire reason of going to SXSW was to figure out opportunities in that space going forward, or whether or not we should just focus on our security product. (I went there as part of bacn.com but helped out with some Vidoop stuff)

Just another sign of poor focus.

I have seen this with Scoble and bunch of these guys who don't count themselves part of a company or its decision making - "after" they stop receiving pay check. Even most successful companies mismanage certain things..You can't cherry pick and publish dirty laundry if there is no gross injustice..such things should be highly discouraged because it affects real lives of others

Was I cherry-picking things? I tried to be pretty balanced, though that might be impossible given that I was among those laid off.

Things are still apparently being figured out among the remaining management, but that there was no public acknowledgement that the company was out of money seemed irresponsible to me, and needed to be addressed. I think their lack of disclosure affects the real lives of others more than telling the story of what happened and where things are known to be at — especially for a company that deals in security.

Sheesh. What a mess! I got nauseas just reading about how all-over-the-map the leadership seemed. Why did they need 40 employees? Who's the sucker that funded these people?

If factoryjoe.com is down (it is for me), a mirror is here: http://www.iterasi.net/openviewer.aspx?sqrlitid=xbgjos4wt0wq...

Other than complaining about the mismanagement of the company, was there a point to this that I missed? It seems overly personal to me. The bit about the end about leaving the customers in the dark was perhaps the only part that made sense to write about publically. The rest only seems noteworthy cuz it happened to the author.

I could have written an entire book on the ridiculousness I experienced while working at Limewire, but that'd be in bad taste.

The point was to document what was going on, so that users of the MyVidoop service would make a decision about whether to stay or not.

As well, it was a post on my personal blog — kind of the point to be somewhat personal, right? ;)

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