Let’s not do that. I’m incredibly appreciative of OPs transparency here. As a person who is susceptible to the same degree of stress and mental health toil, let’s not make the story about the investor but rather around the stresses of being a CEO.
[edit] Is giving the accused a platform to defend himself that unpopular of an opinion? Online shaming often gets out of hand and goes too far. I recommend this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goe...
1) Contact the accused party and ask him for a written response. By giving him the opportunity to defend himself, you get a more balanced view and decrease the likelihood of cruel & unusual punishment.
2) Out the investor in private forums where data/information that arises after the publication of this article can be fully considered. YC and many other founder networks have investor databases for this purpose.
2 - no, I disagree strongly for two reasons:
Keeping information in a quiet private forum makes it inaccessible to people at large. This means the next CEO who runs up against this investor is mostly completely unaware of their past actions.
And, honestly, hackernews is probably the single most relevant forum you could find to discuss this on - it has a general lean toward tech but it is run by ycombinator which is specifically interested in all things investment.
I agree this is the downside of my proposed approach. But, the alternative is a world where someone's reputation can be irreparably damaged by unsubstantiated claims made by one person.
Do you want to live in a world where someone's reputation and livelihood can be destroyed by unsubstantiated claims? You may think I'm overstating the potential damage, but I think people generally underestimate the damage the internet mob can inflict on a person.
I would rather live in a world where the powerful can be baselessly attacked compared to a world where the weak are unable to fairly attack them - if we need to err on one side or the other I prefer to put up with trolls and scammers.
Even without outing the investors, many founders are currently doing the necessary research to identify the investor and will blacklist him.
I think we should keep in mind that:
1) The accusations are currently unsubstantiated
2) The reputational damage to the investor is already significant and largely irreversable
3) Outing the investor here will significantly increase the reputational damage to the investor
Given the above, I really don't see how it's fair to out the investor before substantiating the accusations or giving the investor time to respond.
EDIT: left out the keyword NOT in the 1:1 comparison
I'm saying that we should keep the identifying info private until the accusations are substantiated.
The internet mob is merciless, and will very likely ruin this guy's reputation once he's outed.
By outing the guy, you are presuming him guilty and inflicting steep punishment when he could be innocent.
How do you substantiate an accusation like "you insisted on talking to me at 3AM local time after I just stepped off a plane after a 18 hour flight" (or whatever the deets are)?
In general, yes, but in this case the most convincing candidate is a billionaire. He'll be fine.