The premise that "venture capital and growth hacking go hand in hand" seems like author's personal opinion and not a widespread maxim. Would the tactics have changed if RapGenius' funding came from a private equity group, friends and family, or an old-school bank? Unlikely, since it was business requirement, not requirement spelled out in terms of financing.
What they were doing is no different than what thousands of other websites do to game Google. Except that instead of paying for links with money they were paying for them with traffic from tweets.
I don't really understand why buying links is suddenly called "growth hacking" when a startup does it.
Seems like anything that is "hustling" is called "growth hacking" now a days. We applaud startups that make it to the big leagues and idolize how much they hustle and break the rules and then when someone does break the rules, everyone jumps in to tell them how bad they are.
What the investors want or do is their responsibility; what funded companies do is their own and expectations of VCs are no excuse for such practices. They're not "necessary" by any means unless the company has a business model centered on spamming.
This unfairly ignores the influence investors can have on the company. Investors have a timeline for getting a return on money, known as investment horizon. Sometimes their bets don't work out, and sometimes the horizon is a bit too aggressive for the company. But when the investors normally have board seats and possibly other vectors of influence, you can't ignore how an investor's investment horizon influences strategic business decisions.
Without venture capital RapGenius "growth hacking" tactics would never attract as much scrutiny.
If RapGenius were not a company going out of the way to promote their "VC pedigree" (even if this is what happened indirectly, because that's what the people / press / bloggers wanted to talk about), they would be a lot more likely to fly under the radar.
Even if someone were to write the same kind of post about their "growth hacking" that started the whole "scandal", it would be less likely to make the top of HN and attract a close look from Matt Cutts...
They were trying to have it both ways - generate huge publicity and do something that does not go well with increased scrutiny. Live by PR, die by PR.
What the author does get right, however, is that the need for growth puts a lot of pressure on a founding team and sometimes that pressure can push teams to take more risks than they should.
Growth hacking is just high ROI activities. Sometimes the techniques don't work out.
There is risk to any action, not growth hacking is just as much a risky choice as growth hacking. If one can make billions of dollars based on how many page views they get, it would behoove them to not try anything that would get them users for less then a few billion dollars. Amongst the horrible things that happen everyday to make money link spam isn't a huge problem...
I've seen this kinda stuff done for thousands of dollars, the internet is just a tragedy of the commons, link spam, link bait, etc can pay off handsomely. Find your technique, exploit the fuck out of it, put some money in your pocket and call it a day.
Rapgenius just got busted before they got the pay off. Too bad so sad. If they're smart they can probably still exploit the fuck out of the "You'll cry after you hear these 5 words from Justin Beiber" upworthy type crap on FB before that game is played out. I hope they can pull off a Cuban an unload their stock before the gig is up.
In fact, someone using far more egregious and manipulative "growth hacks" has been self- and customer-funded http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...