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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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