Comment by xcubed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xcubed | Hacker News Reader

This is just awful. There's owning up to mistakes, which is very "trendy" right now, and then there's being a straight up terrible, unethical, incompetent person. It's a bit gross to reference Ben Horowitz, to try to make this seem like a "classic" startup moment that every startup goes through. E.g., "most companies go through at least two, and sometimes over a dozen WFIOs in their lifetime."

1. "And so I learned that we hadn’t been paying payroll taxes for almost 3 years – a particularly painful thing given I believe in taxes as a means of giving back to society." It's weird and manipulative to throw in how much you believe in giving back to society here. You majorly screwed up oversight of how investment money was being spent to not notice the difference in financials given no taxes were being paid!

"This hurt even more because I’d been paying myself one of the lowest salaries on the team to maximize our runway and support our mission." Again, you're the founder. If you're going to make that statement, at least include that you have a much larger equity stake in the company - you're not sacrificing yourself completely!

2. "Mistake 3: Not being explicit about hacks" should be re-written, "Being Dishonest." Cloaking the language as "hacks" and again referencing PG to make your behavior acceptable - (he says it's ok, it's just really a grey area!)

3. "Mistake 7: Telling a half-truth" should be called "lying." If you still think it's a half-truth, you have NOT learned your lesson. It's not "rule bending." Everyone knows that when you say you dropped out of Harvard, the assumption is that you were some form of degree earning student. Seriously, it wasn't a half-truth if the people you're talking to were assuming something else - it was a lie.

Lastly, NOWHERE do I see remorse for the lives of your employees who you laid off. These people trusted and believed in you, and you let them down. Did these people find new jobs? Did you help them find new jobs? How did you structure their layoff packages? Are any still struggling? Were you able to support their next career moves in some way if not monetarily? Not really mentioned, which suggests you don't really care. You're much more focused on you.

I see that you made this HN account only to comment on this post. I've learned that getting into a back-and-forth with anonymous posters on HN is never a good idea, but I'll respond just this once.

1. You're absolutely right. I majorly screwed up here. I say so as much in the post.

2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being hurt? I don't think so, so long as the export functionality can actually be built before the customer launches.

3. I was a degree earning student, as I mention in the post, but that doesn't matter. The way I talked about it was wrong, whether you call it a "half-truth" or a "lie".

Regarding the employees who are no longer with Amicus, anyone that wanted help finding their next job got it. Everyone that wanted their resumes sent over the YC list got that. And I spent a good part of the two weeks after this happened making intros trying to help people land somewhere they could be happy. The team breaking up was one of the toughest parts of this whole ordeal. Having to part ways with an employee when they're underperforming is hard, but having to part ways when they're doing their job well -- because of mistakes you've made -- is almost unbearable.

> 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being hurt? I don't think so, so long as the export functionality can actually be built before the customer launches.

I'm not OP, but you still don't get what's wrong here. You're still lying. Why not say "Not yet, but we have a great dev team and we would gladly add this feature in for you before launch." It's honest, and frankly sounds more impressive to the client.

Agreed. It is great that he is being open and honest about his morals.

But if I ever learned that a business partner were so dishonest with me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat. Business relations are all about trust and integrity.

He's not being open and honest about anything here. He's a liar. He lied to his partners, he lied to his investors, he lied to his employees, he lied to his customers, he lied to the IRS, and he lied to the press. Every single item on his list here is the result of him stretching the truth and calling it "hacks".

That's fun new word for "lies".

I mean, he's speaking openly about his morals here. Which is undoubtedly a good thing.

Obviously, he's a liar to his business partners, his customers, and his employees. But right now, he isn't a liar to us quite yet.

And it should be noted, that based on the replies here and the feedback, it sounds like he might not be a liar anymore. Hopefully he's seeing the issues that his employees have to put up with when he puts them into this kind of situation.

So he has gained some personal growth from this event. All's well in the long run, but its difficult to make up for broken trust.

It's so common that most people think this is how every one works.

I worked with many sales people who got CEOs later, because they made big sales, but most of them, because they sold stuff they didn't had, because they didn't really know the customers.

In extreme cases, this leads to overworked devs and rich sales people, when the devs are good and the features aren't that hard to implement. If the features are too hard, it leads to angry customers and the company losing much money.

" It's honest, and frankly sounds more impressive to the client."

LOL, how much have you sold in your career? Because really, it seems like you've never had a sales meeting at all.

Look, ethically, I totally agree with you.

Practically though, if you've worked in sales, you'll know that what the OP is talking about isn't just something that happens often, but is basically the life-blood of some rather large companies.

Now, I dislike it because it puts the impetus on the developers to deal with it if it goes wrong, and that sort of crunch-time stress is just crazy, but it's also not something that the OP has come up with on his own...

Smarter clients (and I agree that there are plenty of not-so-smart clients), will actually double-check on these things before buying in various ways. They can, for example, request an evaluation version to use, check with the support department exactly what's actually supported, or simply have them demonstrate exactly how the product can meet that requirement.

I'm sure there are more ways of doing that too, though, so these are just my observations. And yeah, don't trust the sales guys :)

Seth, I'm very impressed with your level-headed response here. As others have said, thank you for writing the post that you did. I've been in similar situations so I know that wasn't easy. People will be upset with you and that is their prerogative--after all, you did make some big mistakes and you know it--but the best thing you can do is make your apology, learn from it, and move on. Good luck!

Thanks for responding. I actually made the account because I haven't commented on hacker news before though I read it all the time. I just feel strongly about it so I had to write a response.

I stand by my comment.

2. The reason engineers tend to hate tactics like this is that it shifts responsibility for fuck-ups from you, the CEO, who should be managing and prioritizing features so you get the best bang for the buck, to them, the engineers, who are now on the hook for a feature that may or may not be able to be built in the time frame you promised. Things go wrong in engineering, and there are unexpected snags and slowdowns, and a well-managed business should be able to absorb them without losing customers. There are very real costs in added stress and loss of personal time for engineers - not to mention decreased trust from customers - that come from this tactic.

As the sibling comment mentioned, just say "The feature is not ready yet but we'll take your request under advisement and let you know as soon as it is." Then prioritize the features that lots of customers want. Maybe you'll lose the sale, or maybe they'll buy anyway because it was non-critical for them. Either way, you should be operating with enough of a financial cushion that one sale won't put you out of business (as PG says, "Deals fall through!"), and being able to aggregate requests lets you build a much better product instead of continually chasing after whatever the latest customer wanted.

Very well said. We actually saw a lot of the exact problems you outline. Largely because of this, as we matured as a company we moved towards the approach you suggest.

I see your point, it can put added pressure on developers, but don't you think (in a healthy company) that "shifts responsibility for fuck-ups" is a bit overstated?

Certainly transparency in sales is preferable, but is promising a (unexpectedly important to that customer) feature to close a major deal a "fuck-up"? There are some potential issues to steer clear of - team burn-out, feature bloat, etc. - but I would just consider it a sales expense/opportunity. If executed/communicated appropriately it could potentially create more trust rather than less.

Yes. Absolutely. I work for a company where deadlines are continually mismanaged for features because it really isn't predictable when a feature gets done or not. And the problem is at the top - but the top doesn't ever blame themselves. And so the blame shifts backward onto the engineers who didn't make the unreasonable deadline. The worst part is that the founders are non-technical so they really have no business making estimates about dea. We try to give the best estimate we can but it really is just an estimate, and it should be multipled by two and then have 10 days added to it just as a baseline. But the incentive is to overpromise, and so we're run into time compression again and again.

To me this just sounds like poor company/project management and passing the buck. I guess I'm envisioning a more healthy/well-managed environment, but maybe those are in the minority.

Almost all of the time the project we are doing for the client is so valuable that they eventually become quite pleased when we deliver what they wanted. But the mere imposition of a hard deadline on a feature that the deal-maker imagined because the client requested it is something we should change. I just think better/more flexible deadlines would be a good idea, in general, and overpromising to a client prevents that.

My experience in my office has been good otherwise, so perhaps I was being too negative above.

It is not overstated. What happens there is that development will end up in loose loose situation: fail the deadline or take significant shortcuts (ship buggy software). No matter what choice they take, most often second one, the development will be blamed.

You could always ask the engineering team if it was feasible (assuming you can do that without guilt tripping them).

First, I think xcubed is right about #1. Not paying taxes should be considered a criminal negligence. All companies should operate within specified rules by the law and if one company does not it gets an unfair advantage over others. As a stakeholder in a company one should learn how to run the daily operations or hire some bookkeeper that can.

The other points (2-3) I don't see any problem as that's how all the companies that I know operate. Everybody sells half-ready products. I would even consider stupid not to do that.

Regarding the employees I think that every employee that joins a company is part of the and the team fails as a one. I have been a part of a failing team and I don't hold the company's owners resposible of my future career. I don't think Enron's owners were very much interested in the re-employment of their staff either.

I was once listening to a lecture by Monty Widenius and he said that statistically an enterpreneur succeeds in the third startup he/she gets going. Failures just teach us how to do things better. A culture where a failure is considered as our only lost chance of success does not lead to anybody succeeding.

> absolutely

When a vendor uses superlatives like "absolutely" in answer to a capability question, they are lying. This also applies to politicians.

If the answer is "yes", they will say "yes" or "yes, because/for example ...".

2.) Caused a lot of big troubles in companies I worked for. The customer signs. Turns out that developers can not make the feature till the launch. Shortcuts are taken to cover up. We ship broken buggy software just to make the deadline. Whops.

Of course, salesman learned that all went well, because all those bugs are going to be reported/fixed weeks and months after launch. He does not see the connection. Salesman do that again and again, promises conflict with each other, development is permanently without feature plan to stick to more then a month. Work get to be done redone again and again and the code is increasingly crappy and buggy.

Of course, development gets blamed for all those problems. Of course development can do nothing about underlying cause of it.

Feature scheduling by salesman during the meeting is horrible thing. That behavior is the reason why sales have reputation of being liers and why companies tend to produce crap so often.

Your #2 astounds me. To me, that is obviously, obviously, clearcut, wrong. And the way you justify it is transparently stupid. You say that it's fine because nobody gets hurt as long as the lie can be made good. The whole problem with lying (putting aside for a moment abstract moral ideas that it's wrong in some pure sense) is that it eventually comes crashing down.

Sure, it all works out fine. Sales over-promises, engineering delivers anyway, the customer is happy. Until sales promises something that not only doesn't exist, but can't be done. Then you have a binding agreement to deliver something impossible. You get hurt because you're now revealed as untrustworthy. The customer gets hurt because their plans are built on something that isn't going to happen.

I'm especially impressed that you're unable to see the parallels with your own story. Much of your post boils down to, "don't lie (especially to yourself), because it eventually catches up to you". Yet here you are, saying that it's perfectly fine to lie as long as it doesn't catch up to you. Did you learn nothing of the commonalities that tie your individual points together?

For the record, I haven't the slightest idea who you are or what your company does or did, and am basing this comment purely on your post and this comment, just in case it sounds like I'm reacting to old wounds or anything like that.

This kind of comment is remarkably shitty. Someone performs the extremely unpleasant and stressful task of publicly admitting to his mistakes so the rest of us can learn from them, and xcubed responds by spitting in his face. What's the result going to be if we tolerate this sort of behavior? Well we don't have to guess, it was documented in the original post: most founders are not willing to admit their mistakes in public.

In game theory terminology, xcubed's comment is called responding to cooperation with defection. In plain English, it's called being an asshole.

When someone does a bunch of shitty things that directly affects the lives of others, anger is a wholly reasonable response. While it's nice that the OP is being open about mistakes, you don't deserve a pat on the back for telling the truth, it's the default behavior we expect of people.

Do we? Human beings tell half-truths and lies pretty frequently. I bet if you examine the history of your own utterances for the past several years. you'd find that you do, too.

There are obviously different scales of truth-telling and deception. "It's your baby." is a lot different than, "Ah - I can't make it. I'm just too tired!" But it's still lying. In fact human lying is so frequent that a lot of the smaller lies we tell to be polite or avoid hurting feelings barely even register as lies, even though that's what they are, plain and simple. Clearly Kant's maxim that lying is permissible under no circumstances is false.

In business lying is rampant. You are competing with liars. Marketing is institutionalized lying. People are constantly embellishing the features of their product so that it purports to do something magical when on closer inspection most features are much more mundane. Sales is even more about convincing the person you're talking to that they can't live without something they probably can live without. In other words, being a good liar is pretty much a qualification for the position.

Does that make it ok? No. But does it mean our expectations are lowered? Yes. So when someone goes out of their way to come clean and tell the truth at great disadvantage to themselves, especially in business, we should recognize that for the exceptional event that it is. I don't think that makes lying more acceptable - but it incentivizes truth-telling.

I don't agree that lying in business is a requirement to run a business and do so well, although you are right in that lying is common in a variety of ways. But I don't have any intention of lowering my expectations nor should anyone have to. Why should workers just have to live with shitty working situations and bouts of unemployment created by liars that lead businesses into bad situations?

I don't think it's a requirement in business but that doesn't change the fact that businesspeople, and sales people and executives especially, lie and lie often.

They shouldn't. It would be better if nobody lied in a way that harmed people. But in a world where you have every reason to never disclose that you harmed people by lying, we should be encouraging people to eventually come clean. After all, the moral hazard here is that if you punish people for eventually coming clean you will never know what happened, which is worse than the already bad situation of only knowing after the fact.

That's why these failure stories are good, even if they admit wrongdoing. And that's why we should be receptive to them, even if it's something we don't want to hear.

The way it's written, I agree with you completely. It's an example of the sort of wantonly confrontational language that seems to flow naturally from many people when alone behind a keyboard.

But the substance of it – suggesting that some apologies are perhaps somewhat orthogonal to the wrongs admitted, or that there may be a lack of thoughts expressed for those let down by the mistakes – isn't unworthy of consideration.

It's just a shame these had to be written from a perspective of confrontation rather than of compassion.

Whether you agree with it or not, Xcube makes thoughtful reasoned points; you are just name calling and trying to silence critics.

There are tons of supportive comments on this thread. Tons. Presumably these are all people who have exactly zero first-hand knowledge of the situation. They are taking Seth at his word that this is an honest description of what actually went down. I hardly think it's obvious that he did this all for the sake of educating the rest of us. He could just as easily be trying to control the narrative as his startup implodes - a very common trait of founders in his position.

This guy clearly made more than just a few "mistakes" - some of the things he outlines here persisted for months if not years... and most of this is just an artful description of what "in plain English" amounts to lying to the public, his team, his co-founders, and his investors for a very long time.

So personally, I have to ask: what makes YOU (and others on this thread) believe what he's saying here? How do we know there's not more to the story?

I agree with others that here that we should all hold our judgement, and our praise, unless we hear more than just one side of the story.

The reason I believe what Seth is saying here is that if he chose to lie to make himself look better, he could trivially have done far better than this.

If he were putting someone else down, I would agree with withholding judgment - in either direction - until we heard both sides of the story. But he did no such thing. Nothing in the article contains any hint of blame for anyone except himself.

I can't really agree with you - I have made many of these mistakes (taxes! Paperwork! Forms!) and it's not out of innate evil intentions.

This sort of article is important - if only to remind the next generation not to be so damn stupid.

And I can't blame him for his lack of remorse - He seems to have built a valid company employing real people - society has a net win. Did it cause pain on the way - yes. But the people he laid off had a job for the time they had a job. That's about how I measure work these days - it's no less stressful but at least it's fewer nasty surprises.

>I have made many of these mistakes (taxes! Paperwork! Forms!) and it's not out of innate evil intentions.

The only point that is about "taxes! Paperwork! Forms!" is the first one, and even the OP wasn't attributing that to any "innate evil intentions" like you've stated, just incompetence. There is a difference in degree of messing up tax forms for a few years and not noticing that you are not paying any payroll taxes for over 3.

unfortunately I don't think many people would understand what Seth and his team has gone through, and I don't think you could unless you got to a similar stage with a company of your own. what is really awful is that most people only want to hear about mistakes from people who are already wildly successful which is severely limiting your supply of knowledge.

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