4 ms·
Dragon’s Den is bad PR for business, say experts
- daeken 17y agoI love the show, but it's clear to anyone who's spent an hour in a startup that you're seeing a tiny fraction of the business. It may paint a semi-accurate portrayal of a VC meeting, but that's where it ends. Of course, they make you think about your business -- who your market is, how much you're making, what would you do with the money, etc. These are useful things to keep in the back of your mind, as it's easy to lose sight of them when you're in the trenches.
- jgrahamc 17y agoSemi-accurate? It's totally, totally inaccurate.
- tptacek 17y agoI've seen like 2 episodes of this show (a bunch of kids, a room full of 5th-tier investors, and a college professor arguing with them) and I have no desire to see a third. It's kind of sad because I think a reality show about a real small business (funded or otherwise) would be riveting.
- 4chan4ever 17y agoInteresting, but what does this have to do with programming, software, computers, hacking, etc?? Is HN just a slightly-more-programmer-oriented version of Reddit?
- daeken 17y agoHN is business-oriented as much as it is programmer-oriented.
- swombat 17y agoIs HN just a slightly-more-programmer-oriented version of Reddit? No. Read the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- 4chan4ever 17y agoAh, my apologies. RTFM I guess. Also, I'm a disgruntled Redditor.
- swombat 17y agoAlso, I'm a disgruntled Redditor. I think we all are, to some extent :-)
- keltecp11 17y agoIt is Great Television.
- rewind 17y agoI know when I watch the Canadian version that a casual viewer would think that anyone going through their first round of funding has to give away half of their company to get funding. I think a LOT of people think this is normal just from watching the show, which is pretty dangerous if you're using that as a yardstick when raising funding from other sources. It's really surprising how many people give up half of their companies to get funding from the Dragons.