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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Except that if you miss paying rent, they let you know, and quickly.

Making sure your bills are paid is the responsibility of any adult. If you're running a business, messing up your taxes should be one of your deepest fears.

The general sense I got from the story was: We were young and stupid, but instead of doing drugs, we convinced VCs to give us $3.8 million, which made us believe that we knew what we were doing.

I agree completely! I was only speaking to the point of "how long until it's impossible to miss this", and how the comparison to rent doesn't work because it's much shorter.

Except that if you do your books, you'll say "I should have $X in the bank" and then you look at your account and you have 1.5$X so you know something's wrong.

At least, you should.

Rent, sure, but many other personal responsibilities are not so kind - especially from vendors who can legally tack on cumulative late fees.

Try not paying your Comcast or Verizon bill on time for a month or two and see what happens. The envelope only starts coming in red after quite a few fees are tacked on.

[EDIT: Don't actually try that :) ]

Oh, the IRS and other tax authorities will definitely "remind" you, eventually. But yeah, it tends to take a bit longer.

And if you don't have visceral awareness of this fact -- you shouldn't be hiring people, and handing out salaries.

They do with taxes as well. But from the article, the IRS had an old name and address on file.

they notice that? ;-)

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