Comment by stonesvsglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stonesvsglass | Hacker News Reader

svskeptic 1 hour ago [-]

'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pitching, what's unique about you? Yo! reply

dang 40 minutes ago [-]

Much of this ("for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons") you've simply made up for rhetorical reasons. But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they're a particularly bad risk to this site. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080432 and marked it off-topic.

Dang, this is a post full of brevity - yes - nevertheless very right. He could have tried to paraphrase it - but this would make it even more exclusive to somebody never involved in the industry before.

This comment saddens me.

Ryan may be "in the circle" now, but it's not like he had a rich VC uncle. It's not nepotism; he had no connections when he started out. Product Hunt didn't succeed because he's "in the circle", he's "in the circle" because Product Hunt succeeded.

Ryan is one of the nicest, most genuine person I've met, and he worked hard to get where he is. He built a great team and a product that people love. My company is where it is in large part to PH, and I'm thankful they exist.

(More: https://medium.com/@rrhoover/from-rejection-to-product-hunt-...)

His personal characteristics are irrelevant to the economics; he raised money from A-list VCs and failed to do anything notable with it, resulting in a bailout from one of his existing investors and a marginally better employment situation for his staff.

Nice guy? Fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You lose that excuse when you raise a Series A.

Personal characteristics may be irrelevant to the economics, but the comments you're responding to weren't about the economics.

Please don't get nasty, as in your last paragraph, when commenting here. It literally adds nothing except bile, and we need less of that.

Edit: your several comments in this thread smack of a vendetta. Schadenfreude is human, but I think it's fair to ask people not to go hog wild with it.

The profanity is a movie reference, which if you've seen that movie would perfectly illustrate my personal frustration towards the tacit acceptance of incompetence that this thread signifies.

They did very little with an extreme amount of advantages handed to them vis-a-vis A16Z's involvement. It's not intellectually honest to praise them for being able to raise money while simultaneous consider them immune from criticism for failing to do anything notable with that investment.

I staunchly disagree with the general ethos of accepting failure as if the mere effort of trying is somehow notable. Ryan may have made the best decision that was presented to him at the time, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that a whole host of poor preceding decisions placed him into that bind in the first place.

I also find myself extremely skeptical that you'd take the time to so vociferously defend the "tone" of this conversation had PH not been a YC company. Given that a large part of this acquisition looks and smells like a life preserver thrown by one of their existing investors, it makes me cringe even further at PH's inability to harness that emotional capital into anything more substantial and at the amount of which people will ignore the reality to defend their own biased interests.

Now that you mention it, I have seen that movie! Okay. The rest of your comments, though, including this one, are just the same cocktail of bile and snark, with more than a dash of personal attack. That's not cool. It has nothing to do with how right you are; it has to do with what a jerk you're being on this site. If you want to comment here, please make your points substantively, without that.

I don't care about what you're arguing for or against, or who owns it. What I care about is trying to stave off the toxicity that poisons this community. It really is that simple, as you'd realize if you looked into how much effort we put into doing that all day, every day. There is no energy left for anything else.

Dark insinuations ("I also find myself extremely skeptical") are sure fun, but from my very weary point of view, a little pompous and a lot tedious. I wish I could share with you how this stuff feels on the 10,000th iteration.

I would counterargue that the pervasive "A for effort!" sunshine and happiness that you're trying to embed is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the bile and snark you're trying to ward off. The success of the overall startup ecosystem needs to be equally supported by the naked, cold truth than it does by blind optimism; ultimately it does no one seeking lessons and guidance any good to look retrospectively at the case study of PH and conclude "Wow, what a great company, they did nothing wrong! Ryan forever!"

Also, just because you prefer to read fluff replies of support and cheerleading and just because you are tired of people calling out editorial and financial conflict, it doesn't make the point of the replies you find bothersome moot. But it's your igloo and not mine; by virtue of me being here I am ultimately a guest at the discretion of you, and thus am bound by your rules in order to stay. I can also appreciate that your specific role can feel like shoveling shit against the tide, and that it's a thankless, rote task that can be at times extremely unpleasant. So, fair enough.

> the pervasive "A for effort!" sunshine and happiness that you're trying to embed

You've imagined this. Nobody wants that, certainly not us. The day that HN shows signs of it becoming a top risk, we'll adapt accordingly.

Meanwhile, the risk that I'm talking about (and that you've been worsening) is the one that keeps us up at night. So yes, please follow the rules when commenting here from now on.

I think you could have made your point a lot better with dropping the profanity and really in full that whole last line.

> Ryan may be "in the circle" now, but it's not like he had a rich VC uncle. It's not nepotism; he had no connections when he started out. Product Hunt didn't succeed because he's "in the circle", he's "in the circle" because Product Hunt succeeded.

No discredit to Ryan, but this isn't necessarily true. Prior to Product Hunt he hustled his way into the circle by interviewing individuals connected in the VC community:

http://ryanhoover.me/post/69599262875/product-hunt-began-as-...

Ash Bhoopathy, entrepreneur-in-action at Sequoia Capital.

partner at Union Square Ventures, Andrew Weissman:

Talton Figgins, product support lead, Disqus:

get a free copy of the upcoming book, Hooked, by habit-design researcher and blogger, Nir Eyal, in collaboration with myself

Sequioa, USV, Disqus, Nir Eyal...most people on HN can't even get any of these people to open an email from them, much less get a response about an app idea.

Please don't copy and paste comments that appear elsewhere in the thread (and especially not as an end-run around moderation, if that happens to be why you did it). We have nested threads here so people can reply to what they read directly.

The issue isn't brevity, but the toxicity that I described in my comment. I'm not sure I can describe it any better than that.

It was a comment not everybody wants to hear (esp. everybody who got their jobs this way), but that very true accounts how this kind of meetings go -- as you mention Schadenfreude, ask the Germans how the burning of books works, exactly this way

> not everybody wants to hear

No, but you're reading this thread inaccurately, in my view, if you think the rage and snark side is in the minority, let alone so weak that it needs additional protecting.

I appreciate that you're concerned about the integrity of the discourse—we share that—but you don't seem to consider the costs of what I just called the rage and snark side. Those are considerable, and probably the largest risk to this community.

If people start getting rah-rah and kumbaya about everything, I don't think we'll have trouble adapting how we manage this site. The goal is the same either way—substantive discussion. But we humans deceive ourselves into believing that the merely bilious is substantive, when it's not.

I don't support any follow-up comments ala "fuck you" etc. - however, if you consider this sort of "accurate" representation of how things go already as harmful, you know the reason of president-elect Trump.

...just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't mean it does not accurately describe a situation. And the OP was not overly mean - just very concise in describing a typical SV situation.

...I don't have any stakes in convincing you, nevertheless I considered it an overreaction worthwhile to react myself

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