Have you seen the movie? There is ZERO evidence in the movie that either Kaleil or his co-founder Tom are talented or successful. They're certainly, as mikek says in his comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10547832, "driven"! But that's why they were seeking success by dishonest means in the first place. As IMDB says:
> The process of building the business focuses on obtaining venture capital based solely on the idea, with the actual mechanics of the website seemingly almost an afterthought, or at least one left primarily to the hired help.
Basically they were two guys who tried to capture a lot of value without creating any, basically by world-beating levels of hustle. That describes the story of KIT Digital, too.
(Don't forget that Kaleil stabs his cofounder in the back in the middle of the film, too — metaphorically, fortunately.)
I think this is a big problem with the current "entrepreneurial" ethos: you have people out there who are really honestly creating a lot of value, and then you have people like those guys who see a big pile of money and try to scheme up a way to skim a bunch off the top, making life harder for everyone who's actually contributing.
The problem is that some of the stories of great success are actually quite close to the ones that are outright scams.
It's harder to tell the difference than it probably should be. Around the 2000's there were a number of acquisitions of companies that were mostly hot air. It's a game of hot potato (don't pick it up!), if the investors make bank on your BS company then nobody will complain (except for the acquiring party, but hey, that's their problem...).
It is also hard to tell which companies are actually contributing and creating value and which companies are simply pumping money around. See: groupon for instance.
Oh, yeah, I worked at a startup at the same time whose founders were super brilliant technical people. We went to go see the movie when it came out (we'd all left the company by that point IIRC), and we recognized a lot of common experiences with what we saw on the screen.
I don't know about Groupon. Group buys have been very successful in China but I have the sense that Groupon has institutionally evaded the accountability to its product buyers that is required to make a group buy into a net-positive interaction, let alone a win-win.
(Amusing sidenote: in Groupon's heyday I met a US spy (who of course didn't admit she was a spy) here in Argentina whose cover story was that she was coming here to open up a local presence for a more exclusive Groupon-like company called Theliste, which turned out not to exist. We had a good time at dinner talking about Arabic grammar and morphology, which she had been studying at a language school in Monterey, California; her boyfriend and my wife were unfortunately a bit left behind by the conversation.)
Pumping money around can contribute and create value — consider Bitcoin, where the question is not whether Bitcoin creates value, which it clearly does, but rather whether its potential to destroy civilization (through prediction markets and tax evasion) is more or less significant than the value that it creates.
Also, there are plenty of great successes that are outright scams. The British East India Company, for example, or the Congo Free State, or the police department of Ferguson, MO, or Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, or the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, or the divine right of kings, or the sale of indulgences. Heck, we could even include those guys who robbed me on the train a couple years back.
I've been around for a while (since the late 90s) and see some promising signs that investors are getting more savvy about these things. The number of companies with real "meat" that get funded seems to be increasing relative to the number of vapid hustle-and-flip stunts. But I don't have scientific statistics for this (how would you even do that?) so it's just my impression.
On the other hand there's the unicorn phenomenon which I still do not fully understand. It's obviously some kind of game to artificially pump valuation, but I'm not sure why yet... especially since over-inflated valuations seem to almost guarantee a down round. Who benefits there?
> you have people out there who are really honestly creating a lot of value, and then you have people like those guys who see a big pile of money and try to scheme up a way to skim a bunch off the top, making life harder for everyone who's actually contributing.
You just described every VC and LP in Silicon Valley. They're not working and creating value, they see a big pile of money and try to scheme up a way to skim a bunch off the top, making life harder for everyone who's actually contributing. It's no surprise that "entrepreneurs" get swept up in this thinking as well.
> The process of building the business focuses on obtaining venture capital based solely on the idea, with the actual mechanics of the website seemingly almost an afterthought, or at least one left primarily to the hired help.
Basically they were two guys who tried to capture a lot of value without creating any, basically by world-beating levels of hustle. That describes the story of KIT Digital, too.
(Don't forget that Kaleil stabs his cofounder in the back in the middle of the film, too — metaphorically, fortunately.)
I think this is a big problem with the current "entrepreneurial" ethos: you have people out there who are really honestly creating a lot of value, and then you have people like those guys who see a big pile of money and try to scheme up a way to skim a bunch off the top, making life harder for everyone who's actually contributing.