Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wave | Hacker News Reader

It appears that this company is taking the "lessons they learned" and the intellectual property they developed from spending $400,000 of other peoples' money on R&D to get VC investments for their next thing. They've taken other peoples' money and turned it into personal gain while giving nothing back in return. This isn't behavior anyone should encourage.

View on HN

If there are people who are willing to give them more money to try again, why should the rest of us have any say in it? I probably wouldn't fund them myself, but if there's some investor who is fully aware of what happened here and still wants to fund them, I don't see a reasonable basis to object.

If they aren't lying to anybody, where exactly is the problem?

The $400,000 they spent is now, effectively, an investment into their future product line. It's not a surprise that VCs see that $400,000 of free R&D isn't valueless. The actual individuals who funded this investment will see 0% of the return on it, while the company that fucked up plans on profiting from the software, hardware, and niche-specific expertise they developed while not delivering anything.

Well, to be honest, Kickstarter is not a shop. Even though nowadays it's mostly a marketing tool, it's original idea was to be a way to invest in ideas you like. That is, take a risk with your money.

I think the idea here is that Kickstarter investors are NOT aware and are easily hoodwinked. Why, even this project appears to have been a lie- it's just that the founders were lying to themselves, too.

The assumption being that the Kick starter investors ought to essentially be protected a little against their own gullability.

This of course all serves as a nice allegory of how rules requiring accreditation for some types of investment were born.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com