>As a startup founder, if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell. I really can't agree. It might help your startup,

>As a startup founder, if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell. I really can't agree. It might help your startup, but at the cost of reputation and goodwill. I could choose to start a company and tell people about it by mentioning it in hundreds of posts on message boards and news aggregators, but even if I contributed intelligent discussion and content along with it, I'd still likely be downvoted, "thumbs-downed", and lambasted the vast majority of the time. Mentioning it is fine in some cases, where it's actually very pertinent to the discussion ("actually, my startup happens to be solving exactly this problem!" or "for a great example of X, check out https://startup.com https://startup.com [Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder]"). These are sensible cases of promotion. But blasting the link when it's barely relevant seems sleazy and disingenuous. >if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell. This is incredibly hard for engineers, but you just have do it. Getting publicity is easy, especially if you have no ethics and/or a lot of money to spend. Getting well-deserved and organic publicity is much harder. Your post was in response to a minor-ish announcement about a programming language that's been around for 4 years, one very similar to the most popular one (JavaScript), and which definitely isn't some kind of unicorn or barely-known gem. If you just wanted to show that real people are using TypeScript in production, why couldn't you have said "my startup has been successfully using TS for X amount of time and we've been loving it" and nothing more? Anyone who was genuinely interested in what startup it was could look at your other posts, or message you, or click the link from your profile if you had it listed it there. You didn't even link to any source code to show people examples of practical TypeScript. The exact startup that's using TS doesn't matter in respect to the nature of the comment you made. Perhaps if it were something really notable and unexpected, like Twitter or Google suddenly using TS for their frontend, then mentioning the company makes sense. Here, it just seems like shameless self-promotion. As a result of your post, I think a little more highly of TypeScript, but in turn, I also think less of your startup. Which is a shame, since it seems like a good idea.