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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

the next day, I sat down and wrote the investor an email. I told him that while we appreciated the offer, we were being very strategic about which investors to partner with. It felt pretty gutsy at the time...

This doesn't seem gutsy to me; it seems downright timid. Now, I'm writing this from the position of not needing or wanting investment in my startup; but if you've decided to turn down an investor because he's a creep (which makes perfect sense to me), why not call him out on his behaviour?

Sending a polite reply about being strategic in how you select investors sends the message that you've selected against this guy because he's not a useful angel investor; the message he needs to receive is that you're selecting against him because he's a crappy human being.

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Because it wouldn't accomplish anything productive. At best it makes her feel a little bit better, but at worst it backfires and burns some bridges that don't need to be burned.

At best it makes her feel a little bit better

No, at best it might prevent a sexual assault.

What did she accomplish then? If naming him burns bridges does telling this story help?

It is not her job to fix him. Her job is making payroll.

I think it's everybody's job to take reasonable steps to prevent anyone else from experiencing the type of assault she describes.

In that spirit, let me take it upon myself to remind you not to heap additional responsibilities on victims of harassment. She wrote it up, which is already more than she owed the world.

I'm not trying to heap additional responsibilities on victims of harassment. I'm just saying that I think there are certain responsibilities everybody has, whether they're victims or not. If one of her co-founders had been writing that email, I would have exactly the same comment.

None of her responsibilities involve sending "the message he needs to receive". His needs are not material to the conversation. It is not her job to fix him.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. I have a more expansive view of "duty to society" than you.

By this logic it isn't anyone's duty to do anything about abusive behaviour. That's certainly a valid opinion, but I disagree.

I think that it's everyone's duty to take reasonable steps to fix these problems. It's arguable whether the specific step in question would be reasonable and productive, but dismissing it because it's "not her job" is wrong imho.

See what's happening here? She didn't do nothing. But what she did do snapped two nerd tripwires:

* she didn't "name and shame", and so managed to suck a lot of the personal drama out of the story, making it less fun to discuss on a message board, and so now us nerds will bitch about that --- but from up on our high-horse, so as not to have to concede that we're looking for a soap opera to distract us from our unit tests and CSS tweaks.

* by not naming the person who did this, she interrupted the flow of first-principles logic (the one that goes from "distilled raw facts in her narrative" to "preferred conclusions"), and the crudded-up plinko machines our brains use to evaluate these stories therefore lead us to doubt her narrative instead of just accepting the painful conclusion that sometimes good faith requires us to stipulate things and accept incomplete information.

I think you're getting subthreads confused. Nobody in this subthread has said anything about naming this individual.

Dude you need a break from unit testing. Also stipulate doesn't mean what you think it means. Lastly I'll never accept "painful conclusions" on "good faith" because of "incomplete information."

Using your logic then she should've taken the money.

Maybe she's not 100% sure she correctly interpreted his actions. And there's a difference between turning down investment, and actually making an enemy out of him.

Maybe she's not 100% sure she correctly interpreted his actions.

That is possible. It doesn't sound like it from the way the article was written, though.

See, here it is: the point in the conversation where we nerds manage to discredit an account through our perverse attempts at first-principles interrogation. "She didn't even try to correct the guy? Maybe it didn't really happen like that, because I don't have a state machine transition that represents the alternative".

This is toxic nerd logic. Fight that urge.

I agree. Perhaps my skepticism didn't quite come through in the words "that is possible".

Imagine yourself as an douchey groper - maybe you thought that the friendly pitcher was into you? You throw an offer and do a small grab imagining a solid yes followed by night of good sex. Instead, the lady immediately takes distance and then sends you a polite "thanks but we don't want your money for this politically correct reason."

You will not feel like a sexual tyrannosaurus, but realise you just got dumped. She was not into you, and walked away from your awkward sexual advances. She even ditched your money after jumping through hoops to pitch you into doing the offer you did. Of course she dumped you because you were you, not because they suddenly didn't want the money they wanted.

You're right, the context might have made this sufficiently clear. I haven't gone through the angel-investment-courting game (Tarsnap is bootstrapped) so I have no direct experience here; but given everything I hear about the importance of finding the right investors and "hot" startups going from desperately seeking money to turning investors away overnight, I assumed that the "politically correct reason" was plausible enough that the investor in question would have believed it.

I apologize if my lack of understanding of the context meant that I didn't recognize what would have been an obvious subtext to everybody directly involved.

Sometimes things change only when people start sticking their necks out, but ... that's her business and not mine, and I can understand if this is not the place and time for her to get involved in something like that.

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