Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?
Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?
> Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?
It won't hurt his chances at all. Startups fail, VCs know this.
As an example, I was in YC W10 with Thomas' batch, and failed/quit my startup over 3 years ago. I found no problem raising money again: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/circleci-raises-1-5m-from-e.... I suspect it will be easier for Thomas since he has more personal relationships with investors than I did when I started to raise 18 months ago.
> Is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of failed startup post mortems in the last two months? Is this a sign that the VC market is pulling back and the startup bubble is at least deflating a bit?
Maybe it's a January (new year and all that) thing?
To be honest, I don't know if my honesty will hurt me later on. I didn't want to sugar coat the reason. Startups don't die until founders quit. You always have a way to make it work if you want.
We had founder issues early on and we parted ways after we shut down the first product. I then led the company to ship second and third products as a solo founder. I could have quitted then but stuck on for another two years. I wasn't ashamed telling people the truth because I know I have given my best.
It definitely was NOT the worst of the breed. I had a couple of different pre-ipod mp3 players, including the original 32MB Rio, and the iPod was excellent. The major thing was the cool design, simple use, and their huge storage capability at the time. The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price. Everything else about it was fantastic, including the sound quality.
Yes, their marketing was brilliant, but it won't cause people to buy things they don't want in perpetuity. Eventually, even the most brilliantly marketed product will fail if customers don't want it.
>The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price.
Those things can't be separated from the product though, which required iTunes and was expensive. Replacing the firmware on an iPod makes it perfectly fine. The reasons that the iPod was worse than many of its competitors weren't due to incompetence, they were by design.
>Yes, their marketing was brilliant
I'm not even saying that their marketing was brilliant, just pervasive. When the iPod came out, a large portion of the population wouldn't have even known and/or experienced that your music could be easily put on a tiny device at all. Their first exposure to the concept would have been an iPod ad, or seeing someone with one.
Why are people even posting on HN? The easy answer is do an ACH chargeback and be done with it. Do it quickly as well since the price has plummeted. Don't even bother with contacting customer support.
It serves the useful function of alerting the community of early adopters that coinbase is (probably) not (yet) ready to be trusted to competently handle one's cash. Also, YC is a backer of coinbase so there's a high likelihood that someone from coinbase will see the post here if it's on the front page long enough.
Don't do a chargeback because the price plummeted, you chose to invest in a volatile asset class, and that's all on you, under different circumstances it could be construed as fraud.
But DO the charge back in this case as it is CoinBase's fault, they failed to deliver. This delay clears the path to one simple understanding, these guys don't know what they are doing and have no understanding of the laws they are governed by.
I had written a few posts explaining this on the other thread, that could be referred to:
I'm not sure if it is fraud or not. Maybe an attorney can comment, but here is how I look at it:
Fraud:
(1) a false statement of a material fact,
(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue,
(3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim,
(4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and
(5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.
The attempt at buying coins on coinbase while selling coins outside of coinbase, then if the coin price falls… If Coinbase doesn’t deliver the coins according to their TOS and you say to the bank that you want to do an ACH chargeback due to them not delivering, it doesn’t fit the definition of fraud in multiple ways:
The statement you would make to the bank would be: “Coinbase did not deliver the coins based on their TOS so I request my money to be sent back to me via ACH chargeback and if they do send the coins, I will send them back to Coinbase”
1) it isn’t a false statement
2) doesn’t apply since it isn’t a false statement
3) not deceiving anyone
4) they are relying on it, but it isn’t false
5) no one is injured since Coinbase waited to fulfill the transaction, they can just resell the coins at the current market price, assuming they are able to actually sell coins.
You and eterm are talking past each other. Eterm is talking about the situation where Coinbase fulfills their end of the bargain and gets you the coins you bought, but you chargeback anyway.
If you only consider the chargeback in the case that they honestly failed to live up to the terms of service, then I will agree that it doesn't sound like fraud. It's still kind of slimy, though.
Hopefully you are selling him the BTC at today's rate, and not at $868. This post is an admission of guilt on your part, so if you don't, he likely has a great case when he sues you (which I would, if I suffered a $12k loss like he just did).
Was the delivery date of the BTC ever set? They guaranteed a price and delivered on it (yes, they took a while, yes the value went down in the meantime). If the price went up, everyone would certainly expect them to deliver at the guaranteed price and not the current one.
What they probably should have done is just reversed the transaction entirely, but if I was deciding this, barring some agreement on delivery time, Coinbase would be mostly blameless.
The protocol should have been to reverse the USD charge(not to the bank but the OPs coinbase account), and let the OP decide if they want to buy BTC now, wait or withdraw the funds in its entirety.
The reason for this is, they failed to deliver, that is not under debate. But they are assuming that someone who was long on BTC as a speculator, is still long on BTC.
In the latest edit Brian from coinbase mentioned that they are now honoring today's rate, which is a step in the right direction, and has subsequently save the OP substantial losses, but this does not absolve them of the original screw-up.
I doubt the OP will complain. If I were in his shoes I would personally request a complete reversal even if I wanted to buy at today's prices, and manually make a new request.
Any seasoned/experienced business would do this.
Example: If amazon fails to deliver/the shipped item is lost in transit, they reverse the credit card transaction and request you to re-order if you still want to purchase.
What should happen is that people should notice that they do not have a reliable process for either delivering the coins or canceling the transaction (if the coins cannot be delivered within some reasonable period of time).
This sort of settlement process is a scary thing to throw very much money at.
Oh, absolutely this should give people pause at spending $35k at coinbase (or on bitcoins period). Or, rather, maybe people should stop massive speculation on bitcoins on a platform that takes at least a few days (best case) to clear.
Yeah, only if he can make the case that he would have sold or used the bitcoins prior to the new valuation, and only if you don't treat it as a currency.
He suffered a $12k loss because of price fluctuations most likely tied to People's Bank of China news, not because of Coinbase's error. There are no grounds for a lawsuit here.
Do an ACH chargeback as quickly as possible, don't be an idiot and wait for a response, otherwise you may miss your opportunity to walk away without losing $10k.
I think you'll see some gains in efficiency, but negligible compared to how efficiently we can move people via rapid transit. At the end of the day you're still going to be having most often a single person in a large vehicle that takes up a lot of room on the road.
With sufficiently good self-driving systems, it is obviously the case that you can safely drive cars more closely together than you can safely do with people. It is not obviously much smaller - you only get to shrink the portion of time it takes the human to react, not everything else involved in stopping or maneuvering the vehicle.
If I remember correctly from another article yesterday, the company went through 7 more rounds of funding after the founders were kicked out. Most of the heavy lifting was done after their ouster, so quite frankly they don't deserve anything from the sale. The company could have easily folded and everyone could have gotten zero.
Worth noting that I was promoted to that team due to being an overachiever on a lower expectation team. So here's the issue... I could have stayed with the old team and ensured my job security, but instead I chose to go with a tougher challenge and surround myself with smarter people to learn from, but I ended up stack ranked out by the very manager who promoted me in the first place.
Ah well. Despite what happened, it was the correct career move and I'd do it again.
That's a pretty poisonous attitude, since half the company isn't going to be in the top half of their team. And honestly, in my experience, most people have no idea whether they are at the 50% point or the 15% point.
What's poisonous about it? It's the blunt truth. In stack ranking, you don't have to be the best employee, you just can't be in the bottom 15%. If you get laid off, it means you're in the bottom 15%. There's nothing poisonous about that assertion.
It's like they say about escaping a hungry bear, you don't have the be the fastest runner to survive, you just have to be the second slowest runner.
I absolutely despise Perl with every ounce of my body.
I'm not saying that it's a bad programming language. I'm also not saying it can't be used to create extremely useful software, or that you're not a great programmer if you only use Perl. I respect great Perl programmers just like every other great programmer. I worked at Yahoo, and from the code that I saw, there were only a few great programmers there. The rest wrote a piles of steaming code/shit that was almost impossible to understand.
However, the nuances about the language really rub me the wrong way and offend my own personal beliefs on how programming languages should be. I hate the array vs. scalar concept, the different ways to access them with various brackets and @/$, etc, and I especially hate that they have separate namespaces. I also hate things like "or" and "||" have different precedences. I did my best to learn perl, and wrote scripts at home to help me gain better knowledge, but once I discovered python, I ditched it and will never go back.
Another thing, I appreciate the author's honesty but will admitting that he quit on the company/investors hurt his chances of getting any sort of consideration in the future and a founder of another startup?