Jessica (the author of this article) is too nice to give this article the clickbaity title it deserves: "The 3 things it takes to be a successful startup founder".
I think the point is that those activities are clearly "black hat", while astroturfing isn't inherently illegal. (well, maybe in some jurisdictions it is. I seem to recall that the UK has much stricter "truth in advertising" laws than the US)
It all exists on a spectrum though, and we can disagree on where the line for black hat is drawn, with no one being wrong because it's a matter of opinion.
There's a big difference between "this happens" and "this is happening now, via these accounts, take a look and see precisely how, as it happens".
Also, if the threshold for posting something of potential interest to HN were "exclusive / breaking news" there'd be far too few posts and likely no community here at all for [redacted; aiming to practice civility and kindness] all of us to enjoy.
You seem to be refuting claims I never made. I'm simply perplexed that so many people don't know this market exists (as is indicated/suggested by the number of upvotes).
They're not 'refuting claims you never made'. They're simply responding to your comment by making their own points. Which is a completely standard way to carry discussion forward.
Because Troy Davis, in his tweet, literally said "I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed"
I think his comments here indicate that what he meant was he wasn't aware it exists "at scale" in this way, but taking the content of the linked post at face value, it's easy to come away thinking "How did he now know this existed?". It's precisely what I thought after reading his tweets, but before seeing his detailed comments here.
Maybe he is a bot creator (or a bot account) that tries to discredit the importance of other bot accounts? I mean it would be the natural step for those groups to try to persuade the public (e.g. reddit users) that is not a big deal that those accounts exist.
I am interested in why you felt the need to make the comment, though? Because it can come across jaded like, "yeah yeah, seen it all before, there's nothing new here", which is sort of like throwing cold water on it, which can reduce the odds of positive change happening.
Good question. The thing that was news to me is that it's happening on very large blogs, not random sites and that it's being sold to and used by well-known startups. Like you, I expect sockpuppet accounts and random linkbuilding garbage, just not at this scale or with this much distribution.
The thing to note there is that despite being on a "black hat" website, most of those ads are from marketing or SEO companies linking to their own legitimate company websites. It's clear most of them just see this as how internet marketing is done.
I also note that as a not logged in user, the Twitter just shows me "related tweets" from people actually hiring or offering to sell social media content.
The internet used to be a suspicious, sarcastic, and rather disbelieving crowd, but that has changed for newer generations. I do thing there are many people for whom this is news. There 's just too much fluff feel-good marketing content going around that one forgets the motives behind it. Old style blogs and comments made it obvious that there were tons of spam, nowadays it has gone covert because major distribution platforms remove obvious spam.
Unfortunately this means that if you want to promote your side project, there's just no way, most topical subreddits will flag u as spam, and you are left with niches like r/sideproject. Or you do this kind of social media/content marketing
It would be news to millions of Americans, for sure, since millions of people know about "the internet" less than they think, and additionally, many millions don't "think like a criminal" to consider how organizations might try to trick people.
And as others have said, even if the behavior weren't surprising, learning about a specific ring of it is.
This very site denies it happens even though it is often quite obvious.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
If you mention this kind of thing at all, dang will pop in and warn you. You can post all kinds of other crazy stuff, but mention astroturfing or vote manipulation and you will almost always get a response. This is because these sites realize the exact opposite. That the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive and they are terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is.
Its not that people do not realize it happens. It is that the average person is underestimating it by serveral orders of magnitude.
That's no denial. That guideline specifically asks people to notify us so we can investigate. We do that every time anyone asks. I've personally spent hundreds (probably thousands) of hours investigating such things, have banned many accounts and sites for it, and have put tons of effort into writing code to combat it. We take it seriously. We just need some evidence. Surely you don't think we should lower the bar below that?
If you don't believe me, ask troydavis, who went to all the trouble of investigating the above case and writing the OP, whether we take evidence seriously and ban accounts and sites based on it. Or any of the countless other HN users who spot things and ask us to look into them. They're the ones who actually care enough about the community to help protect it.
The problem is that there's another side of the coin: most of the cheap insinuations of astroturfing, shilling, foreign-agenting, spying, botting, and all the rest of it—where by "most" I mean the vast majority—are pulled (begging your pardon) purely out of the insinuator's ass. Internet users just love to make this stuff up as a cheap way of throwing shade on whatever they dislike. That's the dross the guidelines ask HN users to keep out of the threads. This is important because gratuitously accusing others of dishonesty is a fast track to poisoning community, and it's 1000x easier to generate such accusations than it is to answer them.
> This is because these sites realize the exact opposite. That the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive and they are terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is.
Here is something I can answer definitively—you're talking about what's going on in my mind and I think I can speak with some authority about that. No, that is not what's happening. What's happening is that I worry about the integrity of the community on two sides: protecting it from actual abuse and manipulation on the one hand, and protecting it from toxic fantasy bullshit on the other.
> I've personally spent hundreds (probably thousands) of hours investigating such things, have banned many accounts and sites for it, and have put tons of effort into writing code to combat it.
> No, that is not what's happening.
Not to try and get clever and twist your words, but these statements do not appear to line up particularly well with one another.
Ok, I'll give you a detailed breakdown. You said that three things were happening which in reality are not:
(1) that we "realize the exact opposite [of what we say]" — in reality, I tell the truth as far as I know it, because I respect this community (edit: plus, for the cynical, it would be a stupid and unnecessary risk not to);
(2) that we're "terrified what will happen if the public finds out how common it is" — in reality, I'm confident that the community would be bowled over by how diligently we work on this, and my only woe is that half the commenters don't want to hear it when I tell them how common it is (namely, that it's uncommon relative to the insinuations that they love to fill the threads with, and that such insinuations are the harder problem to solve and a heavier burden on moderators);
(3) that "the percentage of this stuff is absolutely massive" — in reality, unless I'm wildly ignorant of my job, it's tiny relative to the quantity of imaginary things people make up about it. The latter is the greater threat to HN. With real astroturfing and other forms of abuse, it's possible to find evidence and take action. But how do you persuade the internet not to hurl shit-soaked spaghetti everywhere? (Sorry for the unhinged metaphors, but it's demoralizing to argue about this in HN comments, because none of the users making grand insinuations want to hear about that side of the problem, and when I raise it they say things like "dang denies that astroturfing exists".)
We have a rule that you can't manipulate voting, commenting, or submissions on HN (because some people do that and shouldn't). We have another rule that you can't smear others with insinuations of abuse without evidence (because some people do that and shouldn't). There's no contradiction there. That doesn't seem hard to understand.
> in reality, unless I'm wildly ignorant of my job, it's tiny relative to the quantity of imaginary things people make up about it.
It is a safe bet you would not have written this the way you did if you knew this was a larger problem that you did not reveal or you were an amazing thespian.
Apologies on the insultation, which is obviously unfounded at this point.
The person who was accused of "stealing customer data" was the other co-founder - not Adora (CEO & now YC partner).
If you actually look into the details of the matter, what happened was that the co-founder acquired the failed company as it was put through a bankruptcy process.
People who weren't privy to the process thought it was stealing when it really wasn't different from any other acquisition.
How can you say all that and not mention the fact that they are sibling? You make it sound like 2 separate person that have no relationship to each other. It looks like you have something to hide by just ignoring that big fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homejoy
Don't you think it's possible that the person you're responding to has a different understanding of what a sibling relationship means? I think it's a little rude to inject your feelings about what a sibling relationship must be and resort to innuendo.
A 3rd party called Sherwood was brought on to wind down the company. This is common thing for a company to do when there are lots of assets to sell and loose ends to tie up. Everything from office furniture to domains to etc. They made all the decisions to sell what to who.
If anyone wants a startup idea, it's to make the inverse of Stripe Atlas. Closing down a company properly is a very long and complicated process.
This account doesn’t explain why your brother proceeded to misappropriated the startups database, and then terminated the rebranded startup once the wrongdoing was uncovered.
I'm skeptical a neutral 3rd-party would advocate selling credit card data to a person planning an illegal scheme. Especially when that person is your own brother.
Worth noting that the proximate cause of death is often times largely uninformative as to why the startup actually failed.
Most failed startups fit into the following timeline:
was burning more money than it was making =>
failed at raising more money =>
did a round of layoffs / cost cuts to get economics under control =>
couldn't right the ship and shut down / did a fire sale or acquihire
But, the above timeline doesn't teach you much about why the company really failed. The real answer almost always involves a multitude of contributing factors, and requires intimate knowledge of the startup's business.
For the most part, the only reliable source for this type of information is one of the founders, board members, or (sometimes but not always) c-level execs. And, even then, they have to be willing to be vulnerable (which is very rare).
If I could give some advice to Failory, it would be to think about how you can incentivize founders to share their stories. As it stands, they have little to gain and potentially a lot to lose (e.g. being labeled one of YC's "biggest failures")
One of the best talks I had was a two hour discussion of this very topic with John Walecka. John had invested in Freegate and we were discussing risks and why things failed.
He helped me understand both the concept of 'stacking risk' (where the startup is taking on more unknowns than it should) and 'over burning' where a startup attempts to hire itself into shortening its schedule which not only fails but exhausts needed capital.
To this day I never hire an engineer if I cannot write down EXACTLY what they will be working on and how it will help the schedule. Even if they are a "super star", if I don't have something for them to do that will check off things that are currently on the path to the next milestone, no offer.
Whenever I've watched over hiring from inside or outside it tends to end badly.
> Whenever I've watched over hiring from inside or outside it tends to end badly.
I can relate with this. I first saw this phenomenon play out twice within a large FAANG company where the leadership wanted to ship an immensely complex product fast by throwing people and so over hired. Both products failed miserably.
And the I saw a repeat of this at the entire company level. The extent of over hire was immense, fueled by cheap investor money and their push to grow-at-all-cost. The company is now just barely managing to survive, after a few rounds of layoffs and pivots.
Over hiring is a huge red flag from the long term success perspective. However, as an individual, if you get in early on in the cycle and play it well you will rise very fast in the org chart. I’ve seen a few do that consistently. Good for them I guess.
The two are connected. Over hiring is done on purpose to game promotions. In startups for funding. Depending on the timing and where you are in the hierarchy it can go either way. People switch every 2 years now so it’d doesn’t matter how the team does in the long term.
I'm sure the trend generalizes, but I'd be wary of cargo-culting it because a number of simple and plausible explanations put the causality arrow firmly in the other direction. Failure isn't fun to share, failure implies a need to re-think and strategize, failure means you can't delegate enough of your responsibilities to specialize in appearing quick and decisive to your investors, failure means you aren't in the startup circle anymore and aren't looking to cultivate your relationship with Sam Altman, and so on. Any one of those effects could singlehandedly create the observed trend without implying that quick response times lead to healthy businesses.
Of course, it's more of a symptom that is an emergent property than a root cause. Like saying every top tennis player uses $$$ rackets - so if I use $$$ rackets, I'll be a top tennis player.
If people knew Sam Altman judged companies more positively by their response times which resulted in more funding, that's a metric just begging to be gamed without actually making the business better.
As someone who is generally a "slow responder", I'll guess at the root cause. My guess is that being a slow email responder is correlated with (a) higher propensity to procrastinate, (b) general indecisiveness and (c) lower self-esteem, all of which are not hard to see why they would negatively impact business success. Of course, I could just be projecting, but when I am slow to respond to an email, it's usually because I want to overthink the response, or that something about writing the response is generally uncomfortable so I practice avoidant behavior (same thing feeds into procrastination). That root cause trait has proven very inhibitory for me achieving my goals.
Oh, that is 100% me. I have this anxiety related to external (non-co-workers) people. When I know it's a negative response email, it makes my heart and body tense up. I know it's purely an internal response, a personal perception/projection, giving imaginative power away, etc etc. I try to woo-sa (meditate) through it, but it's still very real for me.
Side note, for a throwaway account - you are impressively dedicated to it.
Sometimes jumping right into every single thing is not the best, ideal decisions do not all come the same way, and self-esteem has its ups and downs.
Independently, opportunity can be a real wild card.
Regardless, I think an investor can expect a prospect to be putting full time effort into building a relationship that can lead to a growth partnership, and not wanting to miss a day.
Once you get into ongoing communication you may not want to miss an hour.
If there is good allowance for urgency you're still going to need to go full professional and be able to pick up the phone.
Sometimes around-the-clock with backup.
When you can start out that way there's no need for email at all.
Might also be best at a high point of self-esteem, decisiveness, and undelayed action.
Other times when those are not all completely within reach, related actions should be in progress to more than compensate, in preparation for less inhibited times.
Well the answer is probably in 95% of the cases 'not enough sales', but it wont tell you anything. Also I believe even in hindsight you dont know what was really the problem (in the sense that you know what could have been done to make it succesful)
Not sure I agree with that. Most astute founders can tell you pretty accurately why they didn't achieve enough sales to offset costs, they're just unlikely to do so for strangers because it usually means admitting at least some amount of self-fault. I know I can give a shortlist for my own failed businesses that's a lot more detailed than "not enough sales".
Yes, but is the list really true (in an objective sense). I mean why didnt you act on it, or why was it only know afterwards. (Of course the list might contain a lot of unchangable items, but this would mean the startup was impossible)
Yes, I realized some answer might be: we were too slow another company took the cake. But it is difficult to say what other people can learn from it (be swift is probably what everybody knows)
no explanation is needed for joe founder failing to achieve a $1B outcome. Better to ask why the few succeed and the answer is usually one that could not have even been foreseen.
You might have some obvious situations that were big issues, but I'm not sure reason for a business failure (sometimes even success) is always obvious.
As a relative outsider, I would hope being labeled as one of the biggest failures would be a mark of experience among a set that claims or claimed to uphold the “fail fast” mentality and treats failure like the learning experience it is.
In Walk Street if you have a $50 million blow-up your career is shot. If you have a $500 million blowup you get a second shot because you must have been somebody to be trusted with that much money.
Looks like a universal pattern across different domains: an immediate cause of human death is usually different from the long-term cause of their health deterioration. Similarly, an immediate cause of crash is typically different from the root cause of the problem. But is there really such a thing as "a root cause"? I guess we can always look deeper.
> I don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement.
I disagree, and I think you're grossly overstating it.
I can see how you could characterize their stance as "supporting the status quo". But, there are varying degrees of "support", and this is pretty much the lowest degree of "support" imaginable.
Put another way, you're painting this as "with us or against us" when in reality there's a spectrum of support. Coinbase is standing just SLIGHTLY off center in one direction.
> And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
Why do you think it's strange? The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation. And, such an environment is more conducive to focus and productivity.
> The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation
While I generally agree, I think there is a tacit assumption that Armstrong's actions will work exactly as intended. 5-8% of workforce is...honestly I don't know if it's high or low, but is certainly non-trivial. These weren't strategic layoffs or restructurings, so certain business-critical projects might be delayed due to headcount issues/loss of senior staff. If we hear about another walkout at Coinbase 6 months from now, this might just look like a catastrophic management blunder.
Literally firing the walkout organizers would probably have led to a worse media cycle, but likely fewer staff quitting in protest (Google firing the walkout organizers seemed to have little to no effect).
Based on the precedent set by Uber, Waymo will be held financially responsible, but won't face criminal charges. I'd be interested in reading more about the liability insurance coverage Waymo has for its self-driving program, but can't find info anywhere.
I don't think so at least not in the short term. Demand in major metros is much higher than supply. Google will never be able to expand fast enough, in terms of getting approvals from cities, getting the tech right to be able to handle cities, and just the amount of cars on the street. We are probably looking at awhile before it is an actual threat to these other services. Who knows what will happen in that time.
This actually seems to me like a much easier problem to solve than scaling a two-sided marketplace in a lot of places. This is purely a capital + regulation problem and Google has a lot of capital and regulation will catch up as soon as first cities show promise.
Yes, because this announcement is a lot like their previous announcements -- fudging the language to make it sound like it's more available than it is.
It's not even generally available in Phoenix yet. I'm sure someone on HN lives in Phoenix, and has never used Waymo before. Tell us if you can get a driverless ride.
It's got a long way to go before it's something like Uber in Phoenix. It's got even longer to go before it's something like Uber in NYC (10-20 years still sounds right).
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The funny thing is that the pandemic should have been HUGE for self-driving cars... Most people I know haven't taken rideshare in 6+ months because they don't want to ride with somebody, and I only did so in the last few weeeks.
But it was a non-event. I didn't hear anyone talking about self-driving in the last 6 months. If it really worked, and was really available, then there would be certainly some people who would pay 2-5x the price of Lyft/Uber for no driver. (Not most people, but some people.)
I don't see the relationship between COVID and increased demand for self-driving. You're still sharing the same vehicle with potentially hundreds of people a day that are touching all the same surfaces. The driver is only a vector if they become infected. Other than that, the highest risk is touching doors and such.
The car can be cleaned either way -- with a driver or without. That's what happens in grocery stores and hotels now. They wipe down the shopping carts, and they seal the doors.
But there's only one way remove the possibility of getting sick from the driver. We've been talking about that for 15 years, but it doesn't work yet.
I don't think the risks are equivalent on a per-person basis either. The "viral load" apparently matters, so using the same car as 1 person is not the same as riding with a sick driver for say 30 minutes. It could be that the driver risk is great than that of 30 passengers combined.
I will cease to be a skeptic when it can actually drive anywhere but one, small geofenced area. When we're doing it in places with rain, and other poor weather and where roads are not all flat and in a perfect grid... And when we have to interface between old and new infrastructure.
Weird question :) My claim is that it won't be open to "anyone" in a useful way any time soon.
And you need to define "anyone" -- that's precisely what's being fudged here (and what's been fudged in previous announcements).
To be clear: I think Waymo will fold or be wound down before this happens.
In a previous comment, I said that IF we get economically feasible self-driving cars in the next 10-20 years, then it will not be from Waymo. It will be from a breakthrough out of left field. In other words, "we" will have thrown out millions of lines of code and billions of dollars of investment, and started over.
Obviously, if they roll it out, then I'll be wrong! But if I thought that was possible now, then I wouldn't bother calling them out on it.
> Weird question :) My claim is that it won't be open to "anyone" in a useful way any time soon.
Seems pretty clear it will be available to public in the next few weeks, unless you're saying "general access to anyone who chooses to download the app" isn't about general public.
"Beginning Thursday, any existing Waymo One customer can hail a driverless minivan from a fleet of more than 300. The vehicles will be operating in a smaller, roughly 50-square-mile service area. Passengers are free to invite friends and family and to share their experiences on social media. Waymo plans to open the service to new customers within a few weeks. “At that point, we’ll have general access to anyone who chooses to download the app,” Krafcik said." - [0]
Headline: "Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Phoenix"
But
Beginning Thursday, any existing Waymo One customer can hail a driverless minivan from a fleet of more than 300. The vehicles will be operating in a smaller, roughly 50-square-mile service area.
Qualifications:
(1) existing Waymo One customers
(2) you can't go anywhere in Phoenix. Phoenix is a lot bigger than 50 square miles. (Also, even if the area were bigger, 300 cars sounds like a small number to cover it)
(3) Waymo plans to reintroduce safety drivers for some rides as it expands its Phoenix service area
Is it driverless or not?
I'm trying to read between all the doublespeak, and I don't see much progress. Again, I would love for someone who lives in Phoenix to sign up, try it, post here, and prove me wrong. Tell me what it was like.
I think Uber and Lyft can raise their prices significantly and people will still take them, simply because the alternatives are worse.
Owning a car is worse for many situations, and so is public transportation.
If you have any friends with 16-18 year old children, ask them if they are going to buy them a car, or if they'd rather just pay for Uber/Lyft (that's an honest question, but I know what my experience is.) Ditto for people taking care of senior citizens.
There is a fundamental efficiency to rideshare. And it will continue to get better. As I said in the prior comment -- we already have self-driving cars. I push a button on my phone and somebody drives me somewhere.
For now, the self-driving tech is just a big distraction that makes things fantastically more expensive and unreliable. (This could change, but again I see that as 20-30 years in the future. I don't price it in for sure)
Also, drivers seem to love Uber and Lyft for the work flexibility, at least when I talked to many of them in 2015-2018. Those jobs were really valuable to a diverse set of people.
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I've heard the viewpoints you quoted in the media, but I don't think they are painting a balanced picture. It seems like a message that somebody wants to get out there, not a neutral viewpoint.
Of course the whole idea that Uber would reduce their costs with self-driving was also a fantasy meant to sell stock. I don't think the market ever priced that in. It's clear now that this area was a disaster, and the stock didn't crash because of that.
I think Uber/Lyft will be creating value for 10-20 years to come. People in SF seem to be bearish on them, but I think that's sort of provincial view. We might be on to the next big thing, but valuable tech is rare, and it takes years/decades for valuable technology to be adopted everywhere that it makes sense.
People are still buying iPhones for the first time, even though it was released in 2007. It's hard for me to imagine, but there must be people using Google for the first time too in 2020.
There's a good chance you will be proven wrong soon:
> Waymo plans to open the service to new customers within a few weeks. “At that point, we’ll have general access to anyone who chooses to download the app,” Krafcik said.
It might actually. Phoenix suburbs are different than the densest city in the US in a region that sees the worst of weather. Saying this as someone that hopes Waymo succeeds.
Well, I don't know who "these people" are and what exactly they thought, but I don't see why they wouldn't still be skeptical. The announcement promises that "in the near term" all Waymo's rides will be "fully driverless" but in the immediate term they are modifying their cars to go back to rides with a safety driver. So the "near term" will be fully driverless, but right now it's even less drivereless then before.
For myself, I would trust this announcement a lot more if it claimed some new technological breakthrough that enables Waymo to do now something that wasn't possible half a year, or 5 or 10 years ago (specifically, this "something" is level-3 self-driving, as poorly as this is unfortunately defined). I don't see any such claims. The announcement instead reads as so much marketing copy to me, and it is not saying anything that has any practical implications for the technological capabilities of Waymo's cars.
