CEO lies, commits fraud, and the startup craters

csoonline.com

17 points·burgessct··8 comments

Discussion of the original post when this first happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12379518

And quick followup after the story blew up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12394679

From the article, it seems that he's only been indicted for wire fraud. What would a likely outcome be? The statute caps sentencing at 20 years, but being a first-time offender, I doubt he will see anything of the sort.

You are correct. The alleged Federal Crime he committed was forging the wire transfers.

If he pleads out, I imagine he will be given a much reduced sentence and given his erasure of his online presence, it begs the question ... what's next?

And discussion less than two weeks ago about the wire fraud case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14517551

It's slightly scary how much power blogging has. This is an example of a single blog post effectively killing a startup.

You can't quite reduce it to those terms, since without the misdeeds, nobody could've written a blog post that killed the company. But you have to admit, it's very different from the old days.

It is scary but its not unprecedented. Journalism has a long history of taking down people where it is warranted. Look at Watergate.

> This is an example of a single blog post effectively killing a startup.

To be fair, the blog post in question provided detailed allegations of the CEO committing multiple felonies.

As the author of the piece, I too was surprised at how similar the DOJ Indictment and the former employee's piece were in detail. One might deduce, that simultaneously with the publishing of the blog in Medium, she made a call to the Feds re the forged wire transfers (a criminal act).

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