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The HN comment by “throwaway20180315” is dead and now invisible, though we should consider that personal stories like this reveal an important truth about the w

The HN comment by “throwaway20180315” is dead and now invisible, though we should consider that personal stories like this reveal an important truth about the way that startups self destruct. The most common euphemism about failed startups is that they suffered “team dysfunction“. That is a bloodless phrase. What does team dysfunction actually look like? Are we talking about two founders having a polite disagreement or are we talking about two people screaming at each other, people who hate each other? In some sense, it is a public service to discuss this honestly. People have emotions and emotions are messy. Therefore, startups are often messy. It’s possible that startup culture would be stronger and healthier if we discussed this more honestly.

matte_black 9y ago
I wish the comment was still here, I hate this kind of self-serving censorship HN practices.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  You can set your preferences to "see dead comments".
  - Pyxl101 9y ago
    I don't see any dead comments. Are we referring to this comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589161 - it does not seem to be currently dead, so perhaps it was vouched by someone.
    - lkrubner 9y ago
      That's correct, it is no longer dead.
throw20180315 9y ago
Thanks. Apologies if I broke the rules. I did not consider the comment empty, off-topic, flame etc, and tried to keep it non-personal but factual. I actually deleted a bit that was on re-reading possible to construe as an attack. Perhaps saying "Good times" at the end might have added too much personal edge? Anyway, I've discovered that learning to gain self-awareness from listening to feedback and observing your effect on others seems to be a way to reduce the risk of being the cause of failure. Some people do this better than others and it's a valuable skill.
lkrubner 9y ago
throw20180315 , regarding your most recent "dead" comment, is there any chance your account has been flagged? I don't see a problem with the 2 comments that you wrote here in this thread, yet they are both "dead".
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  That can happen with new accounts, and may be corrected by mods. New accounts to subvert bans also tends to be frowned on. Source: I view "showdead" and email mods periodically on both misbehaviour and suspected bad flags. Reasons are frequently given, some flags reversed.
dbcurtis 9y ago
Some observations from a startup that I was involved in prior to the turn of the millennium: The company had achieved some small success with a tiny number of customers, but not enough to pay the bills on an on-going basis. Scale required appealing to more customers. Our key barrier to success was that the two key founders (CEO and CTO) had a combined emotional age of 6. They did come to hate each other. Mostly did not talk to each other, for days at a time, punctuated by occasional screaming. CTO did not have the ability to absorb feedback about making the tool easier to onboard customers, with the result that we would lose potential customers out of the sales funnel because it was just too gruesome to integrate the tool into their work flow (this was a complex electronic design automation tool). No amount of customer engineer or sales feedback could give that message traction with the CTO. Forcing developers to play the customer engineer role during the sales cycle did not result in reducing the complexity of on-boarding, it resulted in non-scalable one-time hacks that made one customer's benchmark work, and nothing that could be generalized. I lay this outcome at the feet of the CTO that allowed this kind of short-sighted engineering to happen on his watch. The CEO, by his secretive behavior, created a paranoid culture. For the CEO, information was like coinage that he would spend on you when it suited his purpose. He later made good money in the expert witness business, because he was extremely good at keeping his story straight, and remembering to whom he had told what. He tended to avoid long discussions in large groups because that could expose inconsistencies. And he wasn't only stingy with information, he was stingy with money. One of my most famous quotes about him at the time was: "If he needed so spend a quarter on something to make engineering more productive, he would spend a dime." I've never been one to demand a fancy environment, a used solid-core door from a surplus house held up by two used filing cabinets will hold up a monitor as well as any fancy desk, but I want a decent monitor for my daily coding. Anyway, my take-aways are to avoid paranoid cultures, spend appropriately (neither too little nor too much) on the things that actually matter, and make sure that key decision makers are able to absorb feedback without going non-linear.

matte_black 9y ago

I wish the comment was still here, I hate this kind of self-serving censorship HN practices.

lkrubner 9y ago
You can set your preferences to "see dead comments".
- Pyxl101 9y ago
  I don't see any dead comments. Are we referring to this comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589161 - it does not seem to be currently dead, so perhaps it was vouched by someone.
  - lkrubner 9y ago
    That's correct, it is no longer dead.

throw20180315 9y ago

Thanks. Apologies if I broke the rules. I did not consider the comment empty, off-topic, flame etc, and tried to keep it non-personal but factual. I actually deleted a bit that was on re-reading possible to construe as an attack. Perhaps saying "Good times" at the end might have added too much personal edge? Anyway, I've discovered that learning to gain self-awareness from listening to feedback and observing your effect on others seems to be a way to reduce the risk of being the cause of failure. Some people do this better than others and it's a valuable skill.

lkrubner 9y ago

throw20180315 , regarding your most recent "dead" comment, is there any chance your account has been flagged? I don't see a problem with the 2 comments that you wrote here in this thread, yet they are both "dead".

dredmorbius 9y ago
That can happen with new accounts, and may be corrected by mods. New accounts to subvert bans also tends to be frowned on. Source: I view "showdead" and email mods periodically on both misbehaviour and suspected bad flags. Reasons are frequently given, some flags reversed.

dbcurtis 9y ago

Some observations from a startup that I was involved in prior to the turn of the millennium: The company had achieved some small success with a tiny number of customers, but not enough to pay the bills on an on-going basis. Scale required appealing to more customers. Our key barrier to success was that the two key founders (CEO and CTO) had a combined emotional age of 6. They did come to hate each other. Mostly did not talk to each other, for days at a time, punctuated by occasional screaming. CTO did not have the ability to absorb feedback about making the tool easier to onboard customers, with the result that we would lose potential customers out of the sales funnel because it was just too gruesome to integrate the tool into their work flow (this was a complex electronic design automation tool). No amount of customer engineer or sales feedback could give that message traction with the CTO. Forcing developers to play the customer engineer role during the sales cycle did not result in reducing the complexity of on-boarding, it resulted in non-scalable one-time hacks that made one customer's benchmark work, and nothing that could be generalized. I lay this outcome at the feet of the CTO that allowed this kind of short-sighted engineering to happen on his watch. The CEO, by his secretive behavior, created a paranoid culture. For the CEO, information was like coinage that he would spend on you when it suited his purpose. He later made good money in the expert witness business, because he was extremely good at keeping his story straight, and remembering to whom he had told what. He tended to avoid long discussions in large groups because that could expose inconsistencies. And he wasn't only stingy with information, he was stingy with money. One of my most famous quotes about him at the time was: "If he needed so spend a quarter on something to make engineering more productive, he would spend a dime." I've never been one to demand a fancy environment, a used solid-core door from a surplus house held up by two used filing cabinets will hold up a monitor as well as any fancy desk, but I want a decent monitor for my daily coding. Anyway, my take-aways are to avoid paranoid cultures, spend appropriately (neither too little nor too much) on the things that actually matter, and make sure that key decision makers are able to absorb feedback without going non-linear.