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Instant Company (1999)
- alphakappa 9y agoFascinating to see where these folks ended up nearly two decades later. Nirav Tolia: Co-Founder, NextDoor Naval Ravikant: Founder, AngelList Ramanathan Guha: VP, Google
- ValG 9y agoAlso interesting to see how the company ended up. Keep in mind it was started in '99 from the wiki[1]: By January 2003...all of the founders other than Tolia had left and eventually In January 2005 the four cofounders who had left and other Epinions employee-stockholders filed a lawsuit against Tolia and the two VC firms that provided seed funding. Lots of context missing around these quotes (read the wiki), but there was a lot of conflict (as mentioned in the posted article) between these "bulldogs and execution machines" [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions
- theprop 9y agoYes, "Partners at two prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms deceived four of the five founders of a start-up company, withholding critical information and thereby cheating them out of tens of millions of dollars, according to a lawsuit.....The suit named J. William Gurley of Benchmark Capital and John R. Johnston of August Capital, both original investors in Epinions and directors of the company, and an Epinions co-founder, Nirav N. Tolia." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/technology/founders-of-web-site-accuse-backers-of-cheating-them.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/technology/founders-of-web...
- jondubois 9y agoI don't understand the Silicon Valley philosophy. Why should people be rewarded for being reckless to such extent? It reminds me of a point by Nassim Taleb which claims that if you look at the absolute top securities traders at any given time, they are usually ones who took massive poorly-calculated risks which happened to work out - The best traders in the long run are usually not the most prominent ones. They get smaller rewards over long periods of time but most of them end their careers with a net gain for their clients. Unfortunately, because VCs are themselves reckless, they think that recklessness is a virtue and only invest in it. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that 9 out of 10 startups fail is merely the result of this attitude that VCs have. They managed to turn this terrible ratio into some kind of industry standard. Maybe it's actually extremely inefficient.
- theprop 9y agoDespite this formidable team of engineering talent, in eight hours of off-and-on tinkering they couldn't correctly assemble any desks. Finally they called a carpenter who had done this before, and he started building two desks an hour.
- theprop 9y agoInteresting also how they had what ended up being the basoc idea behind the much more successful Yelp, also Quora arguably and others.
- landon32 9y agoSounds like they were targeting ecommerce though, and since Amazon added reviews and was a winner in that space they had no chance with that market.
- dang 9y agoDiscussed in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184.
- pdog 9y agoInterestingly, the previous discussion is closer in time to when this article takes place (1999) than today (2017).
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoSomehow I feel that's axiomatic... OTOH, you could be making a joke that just whooshed over my head.
- etjossem 9y agoYou had me at "almost nobody leaves Yahoo"...