https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264&p=3

We sometimes prune top-heavy comments to balance the subthreads out, but not in cases like this, for obvious reasons. There are some pretty interesting comments on the later pages too though.

Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.

You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.

With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.

I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.

Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...

It's OK, come out $XB fintech founders, it's safe for your temp accounts here...at least until the moderators get here and start checking the IP addresses.

1. The first person arrives organically, which is plausible.

2. The second person sees their comment within 10 minutes of it being posted.

3. Decides that they are going to respond, and respond anonymously.

4. Makes an anonymous account.

5. Writes the comment

All within 10 minutes. Consider further that if this were legit, and you were the founder of a multi billion dollar tech company, would you write any comment like this that quickly? Wouldn't you spend a while reading exactly what it was you were saying to make sure you couldn't be identified, or didn't say the wrong thing? I certainly would.

It's not necessarily implausible that Patrick is secretly an asshole. But it is pretty implausible that these two comments were organic and independent.

We have already had Patrick Collison and Brian Armstrong comment on this post (That I know of). I'm sure that many other high profile people in tech have since seen it as well.

The timeframe is somewhat suss, but I don't find it unbelievable.

E: other people also corroborate somewhat similar stories

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389177

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389191

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389509

Longstanding, commenting users are incredibly rare in the scheme of things.

E: active <-> commenting

I'm saying that an account being mostly inactive (In terms of commenting) is not at all surprising.

Someone could have been actively browsing HN for months/years without commenting, so I don't think comment activity is a good indicator of credibility when lurking is the default behaviour for almost all users.

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of comments per user followed a power law distribution.

False-flag sock-puppetry seems like an interesting combination. I'll have to remember that one.

Sock puppets obviously sock puppets agreeing with “the other side” so you would convince yourself whatever “side” you were on was obviously correct if the other side needed sock puppets.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965166) is an example of well-received humor; it's one of the top rated comments.

Note that I did not say whether this was a good or bad thing, I just think you’re overthinking billion dollar fintech startup scarcity given a single bitcoin is basically a billion dollars. Those folks are also more likely to identify themselves as fintech during an introduction in my experience, and Stripe undoubtedly plays in the crypto pool, so it fits

Why restrict ourselves to positive integers here? Hell everyone can be an $XB fintech founder!

- Possible owner of a mildly successful $xT company.

'Always round up' sounds more like the ceiling function (or ceil•abs) - usually rounding means to the nearest integer, or whatever we're rounding to.

Then we can all be in the club!

or 0.00001

> We shouldn't normalize this stuff

You literally normalized it in your comment.

By example, if I walk through a maximum security prison with no power, holding ten pounds of cocaine, typically I will get murdered. This doesn't mean that murder is a thing we should consider to be normal.

Typical is about commonality. Normal is about evaluation of decency.

Consider most topics in a theater of war to see the stark difference between what is common and what is decent.

And please don't write condescending, inflammatory remarks. It offers nothing.

I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.

People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.

There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:

- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal

- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)

- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely

- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.

The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.

Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.

It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?

The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.

I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.

As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.

Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.

Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.

What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.

This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends sounds awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales? https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/

Humans are complex beasts and sometimes the exact opposite of the obvious is the right solution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11573666

Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).

If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.

He’s helped me a couple of times to make my posts more appealing to readers, providing great insight into what HN readers are looking for.

I launched a company that has grown into a mild success because of dang giving it another chance and it making the front page.

dang rules

Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.

Is there a name for this pattern?

1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobs… but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.

2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.

3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.

I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain others’ trust that you’ll do your job.

If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.

I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?

> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

So there are two categories:

1. Helping clarify each others messages.

2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.

Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:

A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.

B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.

C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.

D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.

I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.

----------------------------------------

Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.

This is probably the crux of the problem, the scenario you're describing is based mostly on assumptions of your own - like 'brand management' (whatever that is) and 'secret'. See for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231229

As with any online thing made mostly of people, there are lot of not entirely obvious things about HN, both good and bad. It's not the Brand Management (whatever that is) Shadow Council you seem convinced it is.

Me neither. That sounds like hell!

What about "assume bad intentions"?

See “Fundamental Attribution Error”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Sounds like a recipe for a successful forum.

Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.

Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.

To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).

I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.

Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...

Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.

Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2703771

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707385

This [0] story criticising Gitlab resurfaced on a day of Gitlab IPO and quickly disappeared from the frontpage within an hour or so.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857073

1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.

2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.

3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.

At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/mean.html

[1] http://paulgraham.com/safe.html

[2] http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

[3] http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html

That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.

My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.

The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?

Anyway, I sent this to the comment author via email, but the best I can do in public is link to https://www.blackburncenter.org/post/on-believing-victims

Context: I run r/Relationship Advice.

Obviously we're not talking about the legal system here.

I do think this whole idea has minimal relevance to the thread as I really don't think the PC qualifies as a victim. Just wanted to clarify the idea of "believe the victim" as it's extremely important in potential cases of sexual assault (which, again, not relevant here).

Personally I have became from poor ass bootstrapping startup founder to rich and successful retired entrpreneur (now investor) and it is ridiculous how people will treat you wildly differently as you get wealthier. And at times the exactly same people.

I have seen this type of behavior before even though I am not rich or successful. These people act like they never behaved the way they did or simply pretend it never happened, while they continue to do it to others. Its disgusting how people can be so fake.

If you don't expect repeat interactions with an agent, or expect the agent won't remember / weigh these past interactions strongly, you do what's best for you in the moment.

Which happens to be taking the counterparty's current situation into account – including their wealth/power, AKA how much they can do for you. Entirely pragmatic, if selfish ("disgusting" in your words).

The way to combat this fake behaviour is to increase its cost, forcing the "fake" person to interact differently.

But I wouldn't hold my breath:

1) To "increase the cost" you need something of value in the first place. If you're poor and powerless, you are… powerless. Your only strength is in numbers: social pressure, `∑ little_power * lots_of_people`.

2) This "fake" personality is likely something learned in early childhood. A person would probably need to experience lots of negative feedback to readjust later in life.

3) Have you considered that their strategy ("fakeness", taking into account extrinsic factors like wealth or fame) may be superior to yours ("integrity", interacting based solely on a someone's intrinsic traits)? You know, it is not a physical law that being nice and consistent to people pays off. It's a pretty wild social dynamic, evolved only recently.

Just as a thought experiment: if there was little social cost to it, killing your competitors would probably be a very successful strategy. Would you go: "sure, he kills people, but it makes him very successful and we should give him kudos for that"?

Regarding your last statement, that "being nice and consistent" is a recent social norm, I call bullshit and citation needed.

But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).

If all its proponents "were killed" – your words; an unlikely proposition in my estimation – then yes, that would be it for morality. Something else would take its / our place, but the world would still go round.

I don't fancy a debate right now, but I feel I should point out for observers that this is a minority position in the philosophy of ethics (for atheists and religious philosophers alike). At the very least it is possible (and common) to be a moral realist without making "religious" arguments.

But seeing your visceral response, I'll offer one advice now: don't let your biases blind-side you.

You have revealed your preference of evaluating morality as a choice.

I think morality is a basic assumption for pretty much all human interaction. If someone chooses to be immoral, then why would I want to interact at all with that person? If being fake and untruthful is a choice for that person, I don't see how any interaction made sense. Just the only sensible choice is to run away from that person and if you have business going on just try to close them as quickly as possible. Even online discussions like these would be totally pointless with a person who has selected to be immoral/fake.

You're able to do that only to the degree that you hold power over them. That is what "power" is.

Which is precisely what is being discussed here. Not the personal preferences and animosities of human X (Radim, repomies69, whoever), but how social interactions evolve over aeons. It is a pretty complex dynamic system with feedback loops that span individual interactions (the repeated prisonner's dilemma from my OP), generations and even civilizations.

Let me try another way: You can be perfectly happy with your strategy Y and die content you did what you thought was best. In fact, it's probably the best anyone can hope for. Alea iacta est.

But if you're the last person believing Y, that strategy dies with you. It is not a personal attack on you to observe that there are people who do not follow Y, and evaluate relative merits of strategy Y vs Z. You can wish everyone followed Y (was more like you), and still do that.

Interestingly, lashing out at people who observe other strategies than Y even exist is a strategy in itself. Proselytizing, ostracizing and zealotry are a form of social pressure, and humans evolved to be quite susceptible to that.

On a technical note, "if A then B" is an implication, a form of logical reasoning. An implication doesn't mean that A is true, or that the person proposing the implication believes A (or B). For example, you could say "if everyone is dead, money will be worthless". An implication is an observation about relationships, trying to make sense of the world.

I wasn't even rich or successful, I only got promoted to a senior position, and their faces changed the next day. Those a-hole faces still makes me want to puke.

That was a long time ago. But I still have vivid memory of it.

No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.

There's even a PG blogpost about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D

Small world.

Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.

I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.

If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.

I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.

Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.

> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.

I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.

Genuine question.

> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.

Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?

Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226

> I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.

You must be new here.

PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.

Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.

Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.

That’s Hanlon’s razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).

These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.

At a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick's), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven't been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.

So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe's hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?

...I gave up on my first.

All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.

You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1]. You've also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.

You've clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.

But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can't believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in "bad faith"....

And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I'm sorry. But sadly there aren't very many other options.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...

Your comment about Finix seems deliberately crafted to convey you did not speak with Sequoia but at the same time not denying that you spoke (made decision without suggestions).

So to clarify, are you saying that Stripe did not speak with Sequoia about Finix?

Or that Sequoia "made their own decision", while they have spoken with Stripe about Finix?

Also, we I like to always keep in mind that sometimes resentment dominates the desire to share a certain story, and without knowing anything about the transaction referred above, I'd say it's quite clear that temp7536 has at least some resentment or envy over Stripe's success.

Final thought (not referring to Stripe nor Sequoia in particular): yes, most companies, and most VCs, are sharks. I was recently reminded of that twice, and probably lost large sums of money in the process (again: nothing to do with Stripe nor with Sequoia). I think it's a rule that have always applied to life, in general, and it won't stop being applied just because we have the internet.

I simply hope that things like the Panama Papers, Wikileaks, and such, will eventually bring more financial transparency to the world, and make it harder for these sharks to keep feasting on their prey.

Same SV story, different decade.

https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...

https://johnmccrea.medium.com/why-the-billion-dollar-code-is...

How is it reneging on a term sheet if they wire the money? That's fulfilling the terms of the term sheet (despite the fact that term sheets aren't binding), no?

This can undoubtedly be spun as “HN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussion” but the alternative take is just as valid. It’s not bad faith feedback, it’s HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual

We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. Occasionally I use it if a thread is mostly aflame about some controversy and some commenter points out how the whole thing is inaccurate. We don't use it to systematically privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users—that wouldn't be in the spirit of the site guidelines at all, and we take those pretty seriously.

> We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. We don't use it to privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users.

Do you have the denominator (with root-level comments) for the 41 top comments by any chance?

Thanks for the edit with added context. Any chance of an indicator that a comment is pinned so that people can transparently see when this is done? It's predictable that your moderation comments would be pinned, but even pinning a founder's comment to apparently contextualize a potentially misleading headline adds substantial mass to the claim that certain moderation actions might be done for the benefit of the company or companies involved in the thread.

Framed another way: if PC's context for the article was relevant, it would've achieved critical mass on its own. Helping it with a pin could be perceived as moving the needle for gain.

A simple "pin" icon (or emoji, or however you feel is best) may not resolve whether this is a "proper" use of moderation tools, but it will at least make it transparent when it happens, which adds credibility to the HN platform.

Thanks for digging into it; you didn't have to.

That would be theatre - they can then add a new secret-pinning feature, afaik HN code is not open anyway.

Trust is hard to achieve and very easy to lose.

That allows you to get in first on an awful amount of threads.

I hope he means me.

Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?

Also:

> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.

"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?

We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, “mine them for information”, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior. (And we’ve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I don’t know.

> The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior

If you're in a position of power (and money), people will return your calls, regardless of rumors. This is true in all fields, from recruiting to publishing to VC deals, etc.

This is also a line of defense used by serial abusers who always (always!) claim that because they have had successful consensual relationships, there can't be cases where they abused the other party.

> over our decade of operation

Also weak. "We've done so many things. Seen so many people. It's been a long time. I don't recall. Things were different back then."

- - -

That said -- weak defense is just that -- it doesn't mean offense.

I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.

Say if someone claims you stole their car (and the alternative could be that you borrowed it with someone else's permission, and they had no idea, so they felt it was stolen), would you reply with "I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who feels I stole their car", or would you first say "I never stole any car, please reach out to me if you know of any such incidents"? Wouldn't it be incredibly bizarre to ask them for a discussion session without first rejecting the premise?!

Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.

With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.

I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.

What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.

So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.

However, I imagine Stripe has interacted with many many companies regarding these things, but maybe not.

I think I've just been in too many conflicts where the other person thinks I intentionally hurt them and I didn't see it that way, or conversely, I think I did something to hurt someone, apologize, and they are confused because they didn't feel hurt at all.

Because the accusation was more specific than "I felt taken advantage of" it was they engage engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

> engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

Going back to the dating analogy, if I go on 5 dates with someone and then we don't go on any more dates, that person may assume I had no intention to pursue a long-term relationship with them and was just using them, maybe for sex or company or whatever. However, perhaps I was trying to determine whether I could make a long-term relationship work—maybe I initially didn't think it would work but only went on the next 4 dates because I really really wanted it to work.

All I'm saying is that people can glean different intentions from the same action and it can be really hard to know whether our actions have caused pain to people.

> that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Again, the tricky part is Stripe may _think_ they have cheated in one case but in that case, the other person may not have even seen it as cheating. Eg, maybe I'm in an exclusive relationship with someone and my ex comes into town and we get lunch. I feel tremendously guilty for doing it and confess and apologize to my current partner. And the my current partner looks confused and laughs saying they're grateful I went to hang out with my ex. A different partner could split the relationship with me immediately and say I'm evil for having that lunch.

To one side it may seem _obvious_ that a transgression was committed and to the other side, it may be _oblivious_.

And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. That should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.

I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.

At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.

So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.

> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.

Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.

This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, must) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.

> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.

This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should not have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.

P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.

I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"

*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.

As such, you rebutting with "I never ghosted you" would not be equivalent in any shape or form to "I reply to every single email in your inbox" (or whatever) for you to feel you might somehow be accidentally telling a falsehood if you happened to miss some email in your inbox. "I never ghosted you" in this context would be a direct rejection of the purported intent—i.e. the accusation you were purposefully ignoring someone's emails because you were actually trying to fish information out of them—because, absent the intent, that accusation wouldn't have been made to begin with. You can make the lack of intent explicit if you want, definitely, but it's already implicit in the accusation, and so would be in implied in the rejection of that accusation.

Frankly, I'd love if someone were to extricate their accusation as you did, making it easier for me to parse the different actions and intentions. I really liked how you phrased it: "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us." I feel more confident in rebutting different parts of that—e.g., "I saw the emails and deliberately did not reply to them but not because we were pretending to acquire you, but actually we were in a legal process where we couldn't share more at the time" or something like that.

Sometimes if someone accuses me of something, I'll even try to ask for clarification on what they mean by ghosted, or I'll rephrase it as you did, to try to gain more clarity. Maybe it should be obvious to people what ghosted and fishing means, but I find clarifying can at least help me and the other person know if we agree what the definition is and what we both think happened.

*edit: @dataflow, I really appreciate you going back and forth with me on this. I think I learned a lot, about how I try to pull out the intention from the action, and how others may see intention and action intertwined. I'm gonna let my brain digest this as I sleep, if you want to continue, I'd be glad to pick it up in the morning :-) Thank you!

*edit2: ohhh and for helping me get better at using the edit feature and not creating parallel threads, I'm not sure if what I'm doing now is more helpful, but I at least believe I'm being more helpful :-D

The point is that your reply would need to address the lack of ill intent no matter how you word it. I find "I never ghosted you" and "I never intended to ghost you" both adequate, and you can disagree on either of them, but that's not the point. The point is "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

Edit: Sleep well!

I agree he didn't directly refute the ill intent on the ghosting/mining accusations, yet, I think he tried to cover some of them in the following:

> (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)

> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before? What if no one had previously told him, "I think you ghosted me and I think you were mining me for info and pretending to acquire my company"?

Or in other words... he didn't. Roundaboutness is literally how PR departments spin things to look like the exact opposite of the truth. "I don't think some of your claims are true" is not something that defends you when there are very strong, pointed accusations against you.

>> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate.

> But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before?

So? The reply would be inadequate just the same. I'm not saying he can't say that, I'm saying he can't say that and then leave it at that.

Btw I'm honestly tired of this back-and-forth at this point, so this'll be my last reply, sorry about that.

The reality is some acquisitions are opportunistic, some are strategic, and even the opportunistic ones often have a strategic element. For a strategic acquisition, if it doesn't go ahead (comes down to ROI isn't perceived as being as good as potential alternatives), the almost inevitable outcome will often be (i) a different acquisition is eventually made, or (ii) the acquiring company decides to make an investment in that area themselves.

One of the ways to avoid getting "screwed over" as an acquiree is to ensure you've done the work beforehand to maximise the chances of compatibility with the acquirer: things like compliance, data protection, having a poor grasp of your numbers and financials, and other mundane matters (or combinations of them) can easily trip up the process.

When an acquisition does fall through for almost any reason it's pretty natural for the potential acquirees to feel rather bruised by the process: they've wasted their time, they've been screwed over, etc. Often that won't be the case although, I've no doubt, there are instances where it will be.

(Btw, in case it's not obvious, I know nothing about the activities of Stripe or its founders, good or bad.)

This sounds like such BS. They are just very reactive around PR, and Stripe while it might be hated internally (based on what you say), it is loved by external developers, so of course developers on HN will tend to have a positive opinion of anything related to it and vote accordingly. And they are quite a lot.

I almost downvoted you for going with the conspiracy theory route, but I like the irony of this post being on the top 5 on the front page and your comment being the top comment of that post, while complaining about him having "almost direct control" of HN and the press.

Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we're not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What's a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?

Firstly, you have dramatically undersold what OP claimed, to the point of dishonesty.

Secondly, what OP claimed is a conspiracy theory because it has no actual evidence. If it had evidence it would be a conspiracy.

I don't know about primary function but it's one of them, let's say. The interesting thing is that this has exactly the opposite consequence to what you say. Doing things to jeopardize the good faith of the community would not only be wrong, it would be catastrophically stupid. Therefore, not only do we not to do it, we place the highest priority on not doing it. That follows straightforwardly from the mixture of your premise with raw self-interest, so I'm not claiming anything hard to accept. Well, I guess I'm claiming we're not catastrophically stupid; maybe some find that hard to accept.

I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.

(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)

TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.

dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don't like Patrick, either, it's best to keep the knocks on the right doors.

And when they pin comments, it's pretty obvious. dang often points it out: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

YC isn't trustworthy, sure, but HN is.

Which is a shame because a lot of stuff they do is super cool, stripe press, increment (recently discontinued), blog posts, patio11 etc.

It seems like a great place in a lot of ways.

Compare the two following equity plans:

Example Year 1:

---

PLAN 1

FMV: $1

Strike: $1

Total #: 40k ISOs

Vesting: 4yrs

---

PLAN 2

FMV: $1

Strike: $1

Total #: 10k ISOs

Vesting: 1yr

---

In the second plan you get granted new equity per year targeting some total comp.

This means if the equity goes up in value a lot in the first year, when your new amount is recalculated it'll be way less than 10k.

Example Year 2:

---

PLAN 1

FMV: $2

Strike: $1

Total #: 40k ISOs (10k vesting in year 2)

Vesting: 1yr into 4yr period

---

PLAN 2

FMV: $2

Strike: $2 (new grant)

Total #: 5k ISOs (The 10k from the first year, and now half that # determined by new FMV for a cumulative total of 15k instead of 20k ISOs).

Vesting: 1yr on new grant

---

This lets the company keep the majority of the upside, taking it away from employees. It also hurts employees that stay longer or have a longer term interest in the company from capturing the value they helped create.

And the more the company goes up in value, the worse the trade off becomes.

I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.

To have the chance to be bought out for unfathomable sums at every step, and willingly go manage the headaches of a big and fast growing company (like this thread) instead?

That's why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker's defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.

I do miss Mike Arrington's Techcrunch, though

Gawker's issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.

Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-175041...

> Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.

That explains why I thought they were gone for good.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?