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Comment by ggrot | Hacker News Reader

What you did was a more than a PR stunt. The "betting the company" line is just dramatic hyperbole. I consider "betting the company" to be saying - OK, if X happens I'll shut down the company, if !X happens you'll buy my company for 100M dollars.

In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.

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I believe I understand your perspective. I think you're saying that "Betting The Company" == "Taking Mortal Risk", and I agree with that definition.

I don't agree that the odds are fixed, nor that it's all-or-nothing-to-the-end. For any startup, you take mortal risk as infrequently as you can; you hedge those bets as much as you can; and, since you can invest effort to change the game in reaction to the market, you work to improve your odds over time.

So in the end, I believe you present a false dichotomy. It's rarely $100MM or death, and there's never a guaranteed outcome.

Seriously? You're whining about the CTO calling investing 6 months of three quarters of their dev team into a risky project betting the company? While it isn't literally a 100 percent make-or-break project, Scribd does have competitors who haven't been kind enough to sit on ass for 6 months. They need to have something with some business benefit to show for that 6 months or it's going to be extraordinarily painful.

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