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Comment by jchonphoenix | Hacker News Reader

If you step back from the "hype", not to directly oppose the many views present on this board, and analyze their statements, it appears they have more reasons to fail than succeed. The most worrying thing I see is their reliance on pivotal labs. They mention it in passing, but it would appear that the 4 founders of diaspora have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code. They are relying on someone else to do the most fundamental part of their startup and that, in and of itself, is extremely worrisome.

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I'm not quite sure what makes you say "the 4 founders...have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code."

Here's what I read,

After getting settled in ole San Fran, our first day at Pivotal Labs was June 7th. Not only has Pivotal lent us desks and monitors for the summer, they push us daily to drive development from the interface and focus on the experience, rather than providing just a tool for developers to hack on. Getting periodic help from Pivots has already been transformative on the outcome of Diaspora.

So Pivotal Labs, thanks for letting us use your stuff, eat your food, and for teaching us your agile ninja ways. We owe you one!

That doesn't sound like Pivotal is writing code for them. It sounds like Pivotal is (1) giving them (free?) space to work and (2) mentoring them regularly. The bits below what I quoted - where they talk about specific technology and features, say "we did this..." and "we are adding that..." Again, no implication of outsourcing.

My recollection was that they were NYU undergrads in CS. Why do you think they lack technical knowledge?

I find it very encouraging that Pivotal is encouraging the Diaspora folks to focus on the user experience.

Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free. If you go to Pivotal's front page, what they do is pretty much do all the coding for a startup. They take a business person's ideas and then code them up and implement them. From there they then teach the business people either how to maintain it or how to hire a dev team that can (or work with the dev team they've hired to learn how to work with the codebase).

Its just what pivotal does for a living, so my logical conclusion was that Diaspora was using Pivotal for code, and their comments on their blog were filtered to with PR speak.

You may be right, but that's an awful lot of speculation. As for "Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free," the publicity of "helping the famous kids dream big" may be more than enough payment. (That's assuming we want to be ultra-cynical, which I have mixed feelings about frankly.)

Nope, Pivotal is just providing space and mentoring.

The mention of Pivotal's support actually improved my outlook on this whole thing. It doesn't sound like they are outsourcing the code, it sounds like they are being mentored, and that Pivotal thinks this crazy thing could work.

Every startup has more reasons to fail than to succeed. That doesn't stop a few from succeeding though.

Why is it worrisome that they outsource a part or even all of their code ? They came in to a boatload of money, maybe they're just using that to accelerate their development track.

"Every startup has more reasons to fail than to succeed."

That is true. But I'm curious -- is Diaspora a startup? I understand they're a bunch of students with a right attitude and a wrong idea, trying to give something to the community for the greater good -- have I got it wrong?

They're a startup in the sense that they're starting something new from scratch; they're a few people taking a risky voyage into the unknown in the hope of it paying off big (in this case, via social benefits).

> "Every startup has more reasons to fail than to succeed. That doesn't stop a few from succeeding though."

That's true for an average startup. But a facebook competitor??? Really? cmon. The odds of success are billions to one. It's probably similar to a startup gaining market share from eBay for auctions. The network effect is just too great.

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