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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

If it's jealousy and hatred, then it's not because of being jealous of success. A lot of developers work really, really hard on their startups for years bootstrapping, just scraping by, and being ignored by investors because they're not famous. And Kevin Rose comes along with a half-baked idea of posting pictures of the food you're eating to the Internet, and his "startup" that he's "really dedicated to" get's almost a couple million just dropped in his lap for no reason and year later just whimsically quits and gets a job at Google with no real engineering skills or anything tangible to bring to the company other than stories of what actual developers produced at Digg.

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That half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users in 3 months. That is success.

Just because your definition of skills is limited to writing code does not mean having connections, being good at marketing, PR or selling has no value. It's exactly the same mentality we developers hate when idea-men want to hire us as code-monkeys to implement their perfect vision.

Reading stories on tech blogs does not mean you know how much hard work someone put into their whimsical-seeming startup. Being a celebrity certainly does not automatically imply you don't have to work hard.

And just working really really hard also does not entitle you to success. Life is unfair. Get used to it.

I thought success was measured in dollars, not a shuttered web service.

That's exactly the issue, Kevin Rose is getting dollars for shuttering an unsuccessful web service. Why does Kevin Rose get to cash out for being a failure, simply because his name is Kevin Rose, while all the hardworking nobody engineers slave away to build successful companies without any help or millions of dollars splashing down on them for their supposed greatness which is unsupported by evidence?

It's not for you to decide. Why do NBA stars get millions of dollars for being able to throw a ball in a hoop really well?

You're implying that Kevin Rose is like an NBA superstar, but his startup didn't earn a single penny and got shuttered. How is that anything like a basketball star who throws the ball in a hoop well?

NBA superstars don't get paid purely for skill, they get paid for because they bring in crowds of people and sell merchandise. That's where the money comes from.

Acquisitions are not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, go into a business where what goes on is more like a meritocracy.

Not in the acquisitions game, and certainly not in the acquihire game.

Otherwise most startups that get bought wouldn't get bought, since most of them don't have any revenue (much less profit).

I would be surprised if it would have got many users if it hadn't got the press it did and have the Kevin Rose name attached. Of course anyone who has this power to market is going to take full advantage of it, you would be stupid not to.

What it does though is translate into a lot of people giving the app a try, that marketing isn't going to have people continue to use something if it isn't any good. Obviously it wasn't good enough to hold peoples attention, user retention or engagement must have been bad for them to shut it down.

  half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users... That is success.

No it isn't. Success is earning money and staying in business. Oink earned zero dollars and failed, so how does did this failure translate into success for Kevin Rose? Was Oink just something to add to his resume? I don't get it.

  A lot of developers work really, really hard on their 
  startups for years bootstrapping, just scraping by, and 
  being ignored by investors because they're not famous.

Their startups have no users and they are just scraping by because they are terrible at marketing, or at knowing what people want. Achieving a low cost-of-customer-acquisition is a real, quantifiable skill.

There are basically zero hot startups that have problems raising money. Getting to "hot" is the hard part, and it is not just making something, but making something people want. Good promotion is just as much of a skill as good UI design.

Yeah well Kevin Rose's startup had a couple hundred thousand users and made $0. So what makes Kevin Rose so amazing that he deserves a bailout, while the rest of the startup world whose name isn't Kevin Rose has to do things the hard way, like grinding it out, or EARNING a job at Google, or starting another startup?

It's funny that you think that "deserve" has anything to do with it. Makes me think of "nice guys" who get passive aggressive when the girl they like doesn't want to go out with them, because they did nice things for her and they "deserve" it. But of course, that's not how it works.

This is the way the game is played. If you don't like it, play another game. Raging against how the rules aren't fair and people aren't getting what they "deserve" just smacks of denial.

I couldn't have said this more perfectly myself. So tired of the B.S. around here with failure being rewarded. The golden parachutes have arrived from the finance and corp. exec. world for the chosen ones sprinkled with pixie dust. How about these "stars" step aside, go do something to make the world a better place now that they've made their money and let someone else succeed. (Looking at you Caterina Fake too)

We don't need more B.S. webapps that let people comment on food, people, or anything else. We're all stocked up.

/rant

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