5 ms·

The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000

17 points by thankuz 16y ago

adrianwaj 16y ago
A convicted felon can also be a reformed felon (is he really a convicted felon or is this demonization or a setup http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-facebook-owner-paul-ceglia-and-wife-arrested-for-grand-larceny-after-failing-to-deliver-wood-pellets-2010-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-facebook-owne... ?).. anyhow to me this whole thing is unimportant, but it'd make a good poll http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
- gexla 16y ago
  He may very well turn out to be a rich felon. What I hate about felony convictions is that they get you lumped into the "felon" category with people who have committed much worse crimes. In this case it seems the dude was busted for possession of shrooms. Why categorize him the same way as we would with other felons such as murderers or rapists. On the other hand, it's everyone who has an interest in tearing him down who are calling him a felon (media and Facebook.) Let's see if people will be calling him a felon when he's 100+ million richer. He's a great investor! Maybe he can invest in my startup.
adrianwaj 16y ago
"Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech investor who ever lived." vs "Don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, Paul Ceglia could be the greatest early investor of all time, at least in terms of returns." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351 Nice one Erick! One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments.
- ChuckMcM 16y ago
  "One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments." Since there is an ongoing discussion of the quality of HN comments and whether or not they are improving or declining in quality, I'd like to dive into this bit more. Given the kicker 'Nice one Erick' I'm wondering if this is a complaint that pathik (the author of the referenced comment) is in 'real life' Erick Schonfeld or if its a complaint that Erick plagiarized the comment and turned it into a throw away opinion piece on TechCrunch? One might argue that mining HN comments for OpEd blog pieces would be one way of producing content likely to appeal to the HN readership. In this particular case a one-liner comment by pathik was fleshed out (slightly) into a comparison of investors using a quality metric of their startup ROI. Without taking into account their negative ROI on things that went south. In my opinion the lack of depth or extended insight in the TechCrunch piece was what made it 'throw away.' And one of the things about 'dynamic' journalism is the whole echo chamber effect. Perhaps most interestingly demonstrated when the 'primary source' for Wikipedia articles are articles that are published outside of Wikipedia but point back to Wikipedia as either one of, or their only source [1]. So if we are successful at creating really high quality comments on HN, and people take those insights and turn them into traffic generating blog entries (taking on some of the mantle of insightfulness) do we care? Personally I don't particularly care if someone takes something I've said and writes it up and gets credit for it. But its definitely a weird part of this interconnected social opinion graph that is created by the web. [1] http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creates-circular-references/ http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creat...
  - adrianwaj 16y ago
    From that article, I would have preferred Erick placed his own unique input into the echo chamber against a yellow background, if he has any!! (actually, seriously speaking, I appreciate your point, and I feel my initial kicker does not really mean much more than what it says. Everyone has a different way to research and write and that is what makes the world such a great place!)
waynecolvin 16y ago
Rich people always have people coming out of the woodwork. Just the same negotiating your salary when getting hired and business decisions when starting up are important!

17 points by thankuz 16y ago

A convicted felon can also be a reformed felon (is he really a convicted felon or is this demonization or a setup http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-facebook-owner-paul-ceglia-and-wife-arrested-for-grand-larceny-after-failing-to-deliver-wood-pellets-2010-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-facebook-owne... ?).. anyhow to me this whole thing is unimportant, but it'd make a good poll http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

gexla 16y ago
He may very well turn out to be a rich felon. What I hate about felony convictions is that they get you lumped into the "felon" category with people who have committed much worse crimes. In this case it seems the dude was busted for possession of shrooms. Why categorize him the same way as we would with other felons such as murderers or rapists. On the other hand, it's everyone who has an interest in tearing him down who are calling him a felon (media and Facebook.) Let's see if people will be calling him a felon when he's 100+ million richer. He's a great investor! Maybe he can invest in my startup.

adrianwaj 16y ago

"Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech investor who ever lived." vs "Don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, Paul Ceglia could be the greatest early investor of all time, at least in terms of returns." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351 Nice one Erick! One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments.

ChuckMcM 16y ago
"One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments." Since there is an ongoing discussion of the quality of HN comments and whether or not they are improving or declining in quality, I'd like to dive into this bit more. Given the kicker 'Nice one Erick' I'm wondering if this is a complaint that pathik (the author of the referenced comment) is in 'real life' Erick Schonfeld or if its a complaint that Erick plagiarized the comment and turned it into a throw away opinion piece on TechCrunch? One might argue that mining HN comments for OpEd blog pieces would be one way of producing content likely to appeal to the HN readership. In this particular case a one-liner comment by pathik was fleshed out (slightly) into a comparison of investors using a quality metric of their startup ROI. Without taking into account their negative ROI on things that went south. In my opinion the lack of depth or extended insight in the TechCrunch piece was what made it 'throw away.' And one of the things about 'dynamic' journalism is the whole echo chamber effect. Perhaps most interestingly demonstrated when the 'primary source' for Wikipedia articles are articles that are published outside of Wikipedia but point back to Wikipedia as either one of, or their only source [1]. So if we are successful at creating really high quality comments on HN, and people take those insights and turn them into traffic generating blog entries (taking on some of the mantle of insightfulness) do we care? Personally I don't particularly care if someone takes something I've said and writes it up and gets credit for it. But its definitely a weird part of this interconnected social opinion graph that is created by the web. [1] http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creates-circular-references/ http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creat...
- adrianwaj 16y ago
  From that article, I would have preferred Erick placed his own unique input into the echo chamber against a yellow background, if he has any!! (actually, seriously speaking, I appreciate your point, and I feel my initial kicker does not really mean much more than what it says. Everyone has a different way to research and write and that is what makes the world such a great place!)

waynecolvin 16y ago

Rich people always have people coming out of the woodwork. Just the same negotiating your salary when getting hired and business decisions when starting up are important!