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Comment by newbie789 | Hacker News Reader

1. Who are the folks behind this?

2. How is this funded?

3. The You.com domain must have been an incredibly expensive purchase. The folks that wrote the check for that were cool with never selling user data at any point down the road?

3a. Did the people that wrote the check for you.com make the money they put into it from investing in companies that do sell user data?

4. I’m actually supposed to believe that they don’t have a revenue model at all aside from affiliate links?

5. Most importantly, what is the current valuation of this business?

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Hey 1 It's me, Richard Socher and my cofounder Bryan MacCann. Stanford, MetaMind startup, then Salesforce. Plus a bunch of other incredible and wonderful humans :)

2 We raised a 20m seed from Marc Benioff, Jim Breyer and a few others.

3 the you.com has never been for sales.

4 yea. we haven't really thought about it too much but have some creative ideas we want to explore together with our community. in private mode, we may need to have private ads like DuckDuckGo since that mode is hard to monetize any other way. Whatever we'll explore, will align with our values (trust->privacy, facts and kindness).

5 Not sure how that's the most important one? :D we're not sharing that right now but if you know venture investing and know we raised 20m... you'll get in the ball park?

5 is the most important because without a reasonable revenue model, selling to a larger company and washing your hands of your privacy promises is the clearest way to make money later.

Edit: you guys didn’t buy you.com from anybody? The domain “you.com” was up for grabs and you guys bought it for $10 on godaddy?

Edit 2: Thanks for answering 3a in the affirmative :). Yes, this is funded by folks that have made millions from investing in businesses that sell user data.

He got it from Marc Benioff, who purchased in 1996. I'm assuming as a favor or private transaction, given that Richard and Marc know each other (from Salesforce) and the seed round.

https://www.protocol.com/you-dot-com-benioff

Fair enough. Instead of signing a big check for an incredibly valuable domain, Benioff transferred the incredibly valuable domain from his personal possession to the company.

I’m not personally of the opinion that this is an important enough distinction to avoid talking about my larger point of “This is an expensive endeavor and there is no reason to believe that there is any barrier preventing an exit that involves compromising in the event that Marc Benioff or the other investors at some point want their money back.”

Even if the domain was “free”, the rest of the endeavor is incredibly costly. I’m not really filled with confidence that the founder here either straight up didn’t understand the spirit of my point, or found it advantageous to feign ignorance about this.

I will try to build a large company based on our values of trust, facts and kindness. My goal is not to get acquired in order to "wash my hands"...

Except you've almost exclusively sown distrust and treated this community like we're incompetent. It's beyond disturbing that you believe it's appropriate to gaslight the entire startup community during your product announcement. That's not kind, nor trustworthy, and your "facts" have been entirely wrong.

> My goal is not to get acquired in order to "wash my hands"...

Also, extremely interesting choice of words here. You didn't say you're not aiming to get acquired, you just said that when you do get acquired it won't be for the reasons we all think, which is just more gaslighting and doesn't actually address any of the concerns.

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