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Comment by trikonasana | Hacker News Reader

I've always been super skeptical of this company namely because of the founder (and their wholly unoriginal name). A look into his background reveals no prior engineering accomplishments let alone experience. His Wikipedia page says he dropped out of college to pursue sales and marketing. Yet, despite his lack of any professional track-record, he is one of the richest people in all of Utah and a member of the Mormon Church. I guess it's too early to tell if the company is fraudulent, but if the founder is, it's usually a tell-tale sign.

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I grew up in the Mormon church. His career bio is all too common, unfortunately. If you think about it, it starts to make sense:

1. Missionaries spend 2 years trying to "market"/"sell" Mormonism. This might be a harsh way of putting it, but they are trying to recruit and retain members. Naturally, security/alarm sales are a natural summer job for them when they finish. This labor force was likely indispensible to Milton for his first company, "St. George Security and Alarm".

2. Mormons have a very tight social network. We REALLY trust one another. Its actually one of the great things about the religion. However, this makes us very vulnerable to fraud. There are lots of scummy MLMs in Utah that exploit the already established social circles in Utah.

In other words, it doesn't have much to do with the religion's tenets per se, but from the byproducts of it. I personally hope we produce more "Clayton Christiansens" and fewer "Trevor Miltons" for the tech world in the future.

>> "St. George Security and Alarm".

isn't this why Vivint has been so successful? I thought they pioneered converting recent missionaries into DTD alarm sales...

and converting DTD alarm sales into DTD solar sales.

That's exactly why Vivint has been so successful.

> "2. Mormons have a very tight social network. We REALLY trust one another. Its actually one of the great things about the religion. However, this makes us very vulnerable to fraud. There are lots of scummy MLMs in Utah that exploit the already established social circles in Utah."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

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