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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

It's clear that people in the industry will be able to figure out who the letter is addressed to - and I would be surprised if the CircleUp CEO didn't realise this. So the censorship is mostly for show.

The fact that the VC isn't named, makes it difficult for them to reply in a public way and respond to some of those points.

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It seems like if many people don’t know, then it actually makes a difference that they don’t know. I don’t know the details but it seems possibly important, not just for show?

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

> and I would be surprised if the CircleUp CEO didn't realise this.

That was the point I was trying to make:

The CEO went out of his way to make the board member as easy to identify as he could, short of spelling his name out.

I'm not suggesting that people try to reverse engineer it, but clearly the open letter was meant to be partially retaliatory and partially a warning to others in this space.

Given the timeline, that he was lead investor, the name length, the experience of the VC, the current and past board members, it’s easy to figure out the missing name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CircleUp Confirms the name which would also fit in the redacted parts of the email.

If you highlight the name, the highlighted text is {{14}}. I don't think the lead investor's name is necessarily 6 characters. FWIW, I was deeply curious about who the investor was and spent some time investigating who lead the fundraising rounds on Crunchbase, but I couldn't narrow it down sufficiently.

Where are you seeing the current and past board members? That’s what I’m trying to diff against but I can’t find good sources.

I got curious as well.

One of the funds mentioned in the wikipedia article and that also matches the description from the email removed CircleUp from their portfolio website in 2019. You can look it up on the Internet Archive.

thanks, I was able to figure it out.

Not just for show; doing it this way likely spares that person's SEO.

Aren’t Google Docs unindexed unless published to the web not shared as viewable links?

I suppose so. I was thinking more along the lines of his name not appearing in this discussion's title means people searching his name might not find this discussion.

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