It would be interesting to see how many of the startups that got really huge had an initially negative reaction on HN. We know that most startups fail, that mea

It would be interesting to see how many of the startups that got really huge had an initially negative reaction on HN. We know that most startups fail, that means GDX (the subject of the article) will probably fail, so all the negativity is really just a statement of the bleeding obvious. There is a big chicken-and-egg issue here, in that they need to get a large number of users on the site in order to make it somewhat self-sustaining. That pretty much seems to be what is happening now - yes, this is a PR puff piece, that means they're serious about growing the site. If there's an interesting enough niche, people will come to this. I remember seeing boxrec.com in the very early days; it was still a server under someone's desk and had a handful of users - but the guy who set it up knows boxing inside out. We don't know the background of this family, but I don't think this is just a "let's set up a social network!" hail mary. The play-by-play looks genuinely interesting, and we know people want to talk sports in real time. They use Twitter for this (poorly), and Facebook, but it's not a venue for hard-core sports fans. If they can bring together detailed play-by-play across a variety of sports, and enable people to talk about it together, and maybe bring in streaming / commentary (maybe this is phase 2), this is a very interesting proposition. Building that kind of audience would be massively difficult of course, but also clearly very valuable. Bet-in-play is huge, and that's just one aspect. I wish them luck. I hope they're not as all chips-in as described, but it feels to me like an interesting idea that should create a valuable product.