Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe
1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying "I will only need 20 minutes for this", while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify "important, critical leaders"? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!
2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.
3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.
4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the "I only need 20 minutes for this" calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.
5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.
6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says "I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this". Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he'd be calling in a week to discuss the position.
7) I get asked for references.
8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.
9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it's not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.
10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.
11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.
Guess I'm not joining, then.
I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I've seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadmaybe they just figured, look, it's go-time now. we hire at 10x the ideal rate, we'll poison the culture a bit, lose at 10x the ideal rate, but in the end, we'll see the growth we want to see, which is really all that matters at this point. we think we can take on visa/whoever, so let's go.
i applied to stripe, in part, based on their rep as....being big-ish and maybe actually doing something-ish, but still somehow not sucking. and maybe one or more of the founders being irish means they're not quite as monstrous as a typical tech company?
i talked to this recruiter person who was, somehow, amazingly human and basically just nice. i was like...what?
it was actually notable, unusual, very surprising -- not too sure how or why, but seemed almost unbelievable. _just_ shy of me thinking this person was all prozac'd up -- but it was too genuine.
i _think_ i ended up bailing right on the call b/c of....i have no idea, could have been anything. this was low-level IC/technical account manager position.
...adding, i think you (and everyone) should get at least interviewing credit for time served.
like, i just got bounced from a solutions engineer position. i re-applied to a diff position at the same company - support mgr or similar - and i kind of wish details of my interactions to date would make their way into the new application. _maybe_.
i've talked to folks who absolutely hated my guts at some places, so maybe i should want a fresh start each time thru.
and, as for ATSs, i've had more than a couple of folks get back to me after weeks or months saying, "sorry we didn't get back to you, obv this is stupid late, etc." -- for tech, process, whatever reasons.
i wonder if any ATSs actually help you decide which hires worked or not, so that they could improve their process.
like, what if your most effective hiring happened when you only pinged people back between 8 and 9 weeks after first receiving their application?
google always bragged about how awesome they were at hiring -- to the point where they were at least claiming to track some non-obvious measures of quality, etc. i wonder where they're at now. adding, the obvious -- sucky is their painful-as-childbirth all-day interviews, their 30-day long labor-ious interviews, etc.
Even if that had happened, ghosting would hardly be a good course of action, but I’m biased.
Once you are rejected, the recruiter probably has moved onto the next project and forgot about you.
Got a text months later from the recruiter who told me the whole group that I interviewed for was gone. So bizarre.
The point though is the recruiter reached out to me, which was nice.
Shout out to Sourcegraph who interviewed me ~Q1, had a good process, and although it wasn't a fit, didn't ghost me. It was one of the better interviews I'd had in my career.
Being ghosted is normal and expected.
If I'm ghosted, I will follow up a couple times and leave it be.
People are busy with their own lives, so I'm not offended in any way.
Not ghosting would have been nice. But being nice is not expected.
People here are so offended about being ghosted for some reason. I thought HN crowd would be pretty good at doing business. Being ghosted is the norm.
Is a manager-of-managers ever a very technical position? I am one and almost nothing I do as part of that job requires any differentiated technical ability. An Excel pivot table is as a complex as I’d need to get by.
(I do technical items on the side so as to not lose my mind, but I’m not surprised by the hiring loop not being very technical.)
I did have some great experiences though; in particular Box, Airbnb, and Datadog.
This is why you don't need to give a 2 week notice, and you should always have your resume updated.
Need to take an offer knowing odds are a way better one is coming down the pipe, do it. They can lose budget and cut your role before you start.
Don't treat any job like a dream job, if you get there and nothing works, you have a nightmare.
My dream right now is to work hard until I'm 40 and retire. I can't imagine doing this for another 30 years .
That is stressful. To put it mildly.
This said, having a kid is the toughest and most rewarding job you will ever have. If you don't like kids in general, sure, avoid them. Some of us do.
She's 21 now, applying to grad school for applied math, and (being slightly biased) is the most wonderful kiddo in the world.
As for FIRE type scenarios, unless you have an inheritance or a pre-existing nest-egg of some sort, yeah, kids tend to deplete cash flow. I'm 56, and if I'm lucky, I may be able to retire in my 70s. Part of that is due to the company being killed by our bank, all assets sold off, because they panicked. Leaving me with a giant hole where my retirement (and kid's college fund) was. Started over at 51, at (somewhat less than) 0. Do not recommend this.
Care to elaborate.
If I do end up FIRE, I imagine I could always have a family in a cheaper country. 2 million in FAANG RSUs can easily raise a family outside of America.
He's been active on social media so we know he's alive, and assume he parlayed our offer into a raise somewhere else. Ok, that happens, but to accept an offer and totally ghost? Jeez. I could have used those intervening weeks to interview more candidates had he just sent me a quick note, now I've got to backfill his position while also trying to fill the new ones that just opened... I guess hiring is a shitshow from both sides sometimes.
It was through an employment agency and so I was negotiating via them. Recieved the offer and needed a few days just to review it and consider everything. I told the recruiter this. Then had a medical emergency which had me in hospital for 3 weeks, on the 3rd day in hospital however, I fired an email from my phone just to let the recruiter know what the situation was. Thought nothing of it.
When I got out of hospital after a serious surgery etc, was distracted in fairness. I had emails from the recruiter which bordered on threats about how I was completely unprofessional for not regularly updating him, and how the city is small and the company is big etc.
Needless to say I wasn't too bothered but it took me back a bit.
It'd be funny (in a sad way, I suppose) if the same becomes true on the other side..."sorry, my online assistant just quit so my resignation at the current firm never got filed."
I don't think they understand that if they set the bar that low, then we'll all accept that and behave similarly badly.
Like loyalty - employers stopped being loyal to their employees, so employees stopped being loyal back. Every time I see an employer moan about how employees don't care any more, I feel schadenfreude.
We mirror the behaviour we see, because game theory.
On what basis do you make this claim? It was always my understanding that it started with employees - because what changed was not that employees suddenly started working for multiple employers in the same field but that changing careers was the norm. I don't know how you point the finger at employers for that.
It did not.
> because what changed was not that employees suddenly started working for multiple employers in the same field
That's wrong, that's exactly what happened (from the employee side, though it wasn't the start) first and most, though, and that remains more common than changing career fields (which, of course, happens, too.)
Then somewhere in the 70's, that changed, and companies no longer considered themselves obligated to look after their employees (at least in the UK, this was an age of massive strikes, and labour relations at a terrible low). Then in the 80's, the Yuppies took control of their careers and the modern idea of a self-made career where you hop from job to job within the same industry became popular.
I'm old enough to have had the old ideas of loyalty taught to me in school, only to then discover that the world had changed and loyalty was an outdated concept. I'm kinda glad - I would not make a good "company man". But for many it was depressing and strange, and I know a few people who were sacked in mid-career and had no idea how to continue.
I should have persisted and ghosted them, they ended up putting me in a different role than I had been offered and generally were extremely disorganized.
Honestly, I think going forward if you don't have me sign a contract and give me something in return (say, a signing bonus that is actually paid upon signing instead of weeks after I start), the deal isn't done until I start.
When you can't expect the other party to hold up to their side of the bargain because there are bad actors out there, it doesn't make sense to trust them or tell them what's going on until after everything is settled... and even then when litigation is such a concern...
P.S. Not doubting your experience, just comparing it with mine.
Employers must to provide you with the fine print within two months of your start date:
https://www.gov.uk/employment-contracts-and-conditions/writt...
Any incontrovertible evidence of an agreement of the job, verbal or written, counts as a contract. Everything else is just finalizing the terms and conditions, which either party can agree to amend at any later date and which many employers assert they can do unilaterally.
Is this common in the USA? In the UK I've never been offered or heard of anyone receiving a bonus for signing a contract. Does anyone have a different experience?
It 100% doesn't matter either way, as those bonuses always come with attrition requirements - you have to pay back all or part the bonus if you leave the company before some predetermined time period. If you don't agree to the payback terms then you simply don't get the bonus.
So a bonus paid before you start is more-or-less identical to a bonus paid with your first paycheck. You don't get to keep it if your offer is rescinded or you don't show up on your first day.
I've seen them be offered in jobs/industries/companies where there is a labor shortage or the job is difficult to fill for some reason. They might be standard-ish in some jobs/industries.
like I said, you'd almost always be required to stay for X amount of time - like a year plus usually, or you gotta pay some or all of it back.
What's lamentable is that ghosting has become part of our culture. People think it's the done thing, so they do it. Just as with dating, how hard is it really to keep track of who you owe a response and send them a short piece saying you're no longer interested? It's especially grating in your situation where you know there's no reason why they don't just tell you they have a better offer.
I think that's the key actually. People don't like the icky feeling of negotiating, where you often keep cards to yourself. When game ends and you get your desired outcome, you continue to feel bad about it. And you certainly don't want to be called out and have to defend yourself, even if picking a better offer is perfectly fair.
Decided to do the right thing for once and make a serious effort at investigating my options.
I started out very sincere and honest, but two months of being fucked over by companies left and right in the interview process definitely changed me.
In the end I found a nice position working with honest and empathic people, but the path that lead there was a total disaster.
I work at a company that grew more than 10x in under 2 years from a couple dozen engineers to hundreds. I personally interviewed well over 100 engineers. My time was valuable, but not so valuable that I couldn't spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it's an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic "no", it's still possible to make the candidate feel valued.
One time, I had to shut down an interview cycle because a candidate was abusive to one of my reports. That's the only time I've cut a round short.
Most of the sessions are collaborative solution design exercises. The interviewer can drive the solution, if necessary, and hopefully it's at least educational. The remaining session is a behavioral interview centered on the candidates accomplishments. It's usually possible to set least draw out what the candidate is proud of from their career.
We spent the whole hour interview making zero progress on the task assigned. I kinda wish I had setup some kind of get-out-of-jail situation so that I could have saved everyone the time, but I sat though the whole hour just out of the embarrassment of ending things early.
Despite that, he still managed to make me feel good about the whole experience. At some points in the interview where I was close/slightly off he'd first coax "that's quite similar to X or Y, don't you think?" then if that didn't work he'd coach "here's how X works, elegant explanation, ok, let's talk about Y".
I remember this vividly years later with a smile. Just like I remember all the negative experiences where people were dismissive or ghosted.
Do you mean they can end the interview earlier than 20 minutes, or that it actually takes more than 20 minutes but they can end it at 20 minutes mark?
Either case it doesn't sound good. If they said 20 minutes it shouldn't take much more or much less than 20 minutes.
I’ve also heard (via HR) about candidates being surprised to not get the offer in cases where I kept the interview going and pretended things were going well.
Interviewing isn't just for fun, and even if you don't get the job, you can go through the interview to practice, and hopefully to figure out what went wrong.
If after 20 minutes they just say 'I think this is a no so go home' I wasted a lot more than 20 minutes and got nothing out of it.
And yes, I still name the company when I tell the story of my worst experience interviewing at a company, 30 years ago.
This way you don't waste the candidate or your time if it's clearly a no after interview 1. They feel a bit bad because they obviously didn't pass, but if you've communicated ahead of time it's not a rug-pull.
I used to get recruiter cold emails once every 6 or 7 months. Now it's at least once a week. I got two the other day in the same day from two recruiters at the same headhunting company with 90% of the same boilerplate text in common. Inconsiderate, I think?
I don't feel bad about not responding.
Actually if it reminds me of anything, it's 1999/2000 right before the .COM crash. That's the last time I remember it being this crazy. I remember a day in 1999 when I worked at a startup where everyone's phone (yes, we had desk phones then) all rang in sequence one after another as a recruiter made their way one by one through the company directory.
I don’t hold anything against these recruiters anymore. They find decent people with good work experience, but even that is not enough for these companies anymore. I try to be as cool as I can with them because for better or worse, they might be the only person in that entire process that succeeds if you succeed (your only friend, believe it or not).
They really are your only friend in the hiring process. Knowing this gives you a lot of leverage.
My old boss, however, has good advice on how to make them useful, for those who care to respond: https://code.dblock.org/2015/01/09/how-to-make-recruiter-spa...
Stripe is preparing for an IPO, so naturally they will have some chaos in an effort to balloon it as much as possible.
I was thinking the same but this interview from Stripe’s CEO says otherwise.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/23/stripe-very-happy-stayin...
From the outside, I wonder if Stripe has reached the point of notoriety where they can get away with poor hiring and even workplace practices because nobody wants to admit getting rejected by Stripe. Every negative anecdote I've seen has been shared under anonymity or strict confidentiality. I assume Stripe knows they're a hot commodity and therefore can get away with negative interview practices.
https://twitter.com/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867
Can you share what kind of questions you were asked during the interview process?
More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" still happens to an unfortunate number of people. That said, we want those who interact with Stripe to come away having been treated professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures. On behalf of Stripe, I apologize.
I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.
As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.
Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.
If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).
I've seen odd things first hand with processed food from the grocery store. I've bought sealed packages of food that were all dried out and stale. Or that looked fine but gave me...indigestion. The weirdest thing I've seen recently were some mints where some of them randomly were solid chocolate, no filling. Oh, and a frozen dessert had a sealed cardboard box, but the plastic covering inside was open.
How does that sort of variation happen? I'd imagine that the better your process is, and the less variation you have, the larger proportion of your failures will be "unknown unknowns" that are just weird.
I acknowledge the conclusion that the interview process is f-ed up could well be correct.
Regardless of the size of the org you need 45 mins to get good signal.
20 minutes might work for a “what questions do you have” sell call.
But any company making hiring calls on this model, that’s a yellow flag right there
At what size of org it stops being important who is going to be heading it?
But what if others in their 20 minute discussions with the candidate ask the questions you would have asked if you had spent longer interviewing them?
If the hiring decision is based on the feedback from all the interviewers I could see having many of those interviews be short interviews where the interviewer just concentrates on finding out one important input for the group decision working, provided that there are enough interviews to cover all the important things and if there has been some planning on the part of the company to coordinate who covers what in the 20 minute interviews.
I have no idea if Stripe does the necessary coordination to make that work, but the fact that several of the interviewers started out mentioning they would only need 20 minutes suggests that it was some sort of organized thing.
As a manager/leader of that organisation they will have an important role that can mean difference between those hundreds of people bringing huge value or huge loss to the company.
So your responsibility is to figure out how much time to spend with the candidate. You can choose anywhere between "just hire first person to apply" and "spend a year grooming an employee to see if they can do the job".
And you want to tell me that 20 minutes is the right answer here? That out of entire continuum of possible choices you say that the optimal return (performance of manager) on investment (cost of conducting interviews) lands at approximately 20 minutes -- less time than you take to have a lunch?
I get that he had couple of these sessions but still... it sounds like giving the job to a first person that looks the part.
The former gives more flexibility to alter the questioning on the fly, such as to delve more deeply into some area than had been planned. The latter gets more people to spend time with the candidate.
A mix of this could be the best of both worlds. Have several short interviews mixed with some long ones. If one of the short ones turns up something that seems worth going in depth on that can be handled in one of the long interviews.
You might look to improve y'all's process by looking at datatdog's interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.
1) they always give feedback
2) they have more generic positions, get you in the door to some small filter interviews, and then shop you around to find the right team for you, instead of the reverse approach where people shotgun resumes across your company trying to get in the door. The problem with the recruiter and multiple HMs I talked to at stripe is they didn't seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn't have open positions for X.
3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!
Love what you're doing for science, Take care
They gave me a large and complex take home assignment which I put a significant amount of time into, and which I felt I did a very excellent job with. They declined afterwards without a word. We didn't discuss it, no feedback was given. Just unmatched on the hiring platform we were using.
I am an experienced developer at a reasonably prominent company and I know I wrote the code well for that assignment. The fact that they would assign something so time consuming and then take no time to go over it at all and reject it so out of hand left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth.
I assume plenty of other people do that, e.g. Steve Klabnik with rust articles. Unless they’re just always on HN…
I think it would be hard to scale a business to the size of Stripe without those things. It's fair to say that, no matter what else you might believe, pc has managed to do that. Ergo, by your own logic, he has earned his comp.
Extensive talk about a position. Then ghosted. Then invited for an interview with the hiring manager, who then cancelled last minute. Invited to do an ad-hoc interview during one of my work meetings. Denied and asked for different time.
Ghosted.
Definitely dodged a bullet with these guys. Some companies think because they're growing they can do whatever.
Main issues:
- wrong level offered (e.g. sub-director vs director) despite initial agreement;
- lowball salary offer (~30% less of what I stated I wanted to even start interviewing for the job, and ~20% less of what I was making at my then-current job)
- confusing interview process (too many things to even list them here)
- lack of preparation for the interviewers (e.g. didn't read my resume, wasn't aware of who else interviewed me and on which topics, didn't ask me questions relevant to the position, etc)
You may wish not to do this. As much as the feedback would probably help Stripe and possibly even yourself, given the post you've written, it sounds like it may put someone else's career on the line.
- 35% of interviewers did the 20 min thing. Why haven’t you said you’re going to investigate this specific issue yet? You should have enough data to now go back to the team and find out if this is a real issue, rather than waiting for op’s email.
- this was a senior manager position and already in the offer stage. So you can’t compare that sample size to the top of the funnel.
You caught Patrick on his false argument.
Patrick did not mention the number of Manager of Managers that interviewed at Stripe this year, did not address the "I will only need 20 minutes for this" culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.
The PR spin:
> professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures
If Patrick is interested in fixing anything is up to him and he absolutely does not need an email from OP for this.
The fact Patrick is asking for OP to doxx Stripe’s hiring managers should tell you anything you need to know about how Patrick operates.
Publicly, Patrick cannot afford Stripe to begin to develop the slightest trace of a bad place to work and a bad reputation for such a niche recruiting position as engineering Manager of Managers at Stripe is damaging.
Patrick is asking OP to doxx the senior leader in the office OP applied to.
> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"
While there may be opinions on whether or not this “makes it right”, apologies in today’s world should still carry some worth.
This, to me, is evident in the fact that OP interviewed for a specific, high level position, and named specific, repeated bad processes that go beyond Patrick's generic "We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time."
Patrick has more than enough information to start fixing things on a systemic level. Instead, he optimizes for the appearance of contrition without committing to fixing any of the specific problems mentioned.
Me: "I only need a few seconds. Either you are more perceptive than anyone else I've ever met or you or as arrogant as anyone I've met. Either way I'm not a good fit. Thank-you and good luck in your search!"
Recruiters will hand out accolades, false hopes and more just to keep you engaged until the moment someone else (preferred candidate) has been picked by the client. Then you get ghosted because you're no longer making the recruiter money or because you're now the backup option in case the preferred person cancels before starting or soon after starting, and they would prefer you remain available "just in case you're needed".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/smarter-living/benefits-o...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26408181
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071362
Part of that is understandable. They probably didn’t do a great job interviewing you. It’s probably exasperating.
But I can’t imagine someone who gets so easily frustrated writing about an interview would be great to work with. Because you could’ve just as easily criticized the interview process without bringing the exasperated tone along the way. With clarity and a measured response. But you wear your heart on your sleeve and it’s one of clear annoyance.
Is it? To me it reads just like a blow-by-blow description of the situation. There is almost no personal commentary, other than a couple that aim (and probably fail) at being funny. But to each his/her own, I guess.
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...
> We shouldn't normalize this stuff
You literally normalized it in your comment.
And please don't write condescending, inflammatory remarks. It offers nothing.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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
Hahaha. Or something like that.
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.
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.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965166) is an example of well-received humor; it's one of the top rated comments.
You may well be right, but posting these kinds of things this way is best way for HN to devolve to be unusable for any serious discussion on anything.
--
EDIT: (I can't answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting "low value content").
How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post "corroborating" comments?
I dislike these comments not because I think they are incorrect but because if this is the discussion standard we accept it is basically open season for trolling.
For all I know, one insider holding a grudge could be creating multiple accounts claiming to be leading large companies and thus not being able to divulge their names.
I personally back my posts by my real name and I think this is fair. If I did not feel safe posting something important, I would make sure to include proofs. If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.
As a bystander you have no way of knowing who is right. There is a huge disparity between the person being slandered and the person trying to post slander.
The person being slandered can't defend themselves due to either volume of it or just impossibility of proving you haven't done something.
On the other hand person posting slander can quickly create multiple usernames and crate a lot of "content" looking like a discussion.
An exception could be a criminal case (when it might be ok to both stay anonymous and not have a proof, because of an important reason like public safety). But even in such case Police or whatever other official will try to confirm the claim in some way.
---
emodendroket: I can't respond because I am being throttled by HN (for apparently posting low value content).
Again: how do you know these are actually separate people? Without any real name on it there is no way for you to know.
Do you think trolls haven't thought about it?
Or do you have some way to definitively prove that you are not on pc's payroll?
Paranoia goes both ways, and I think it's sufficient to just have the reader use their best judgement...otherwise we'll just always be in an endless spiral of "no puppet no puppet you're the puppet."
I am not giving any facts or creating impression I know any facts.
I am just discussing the general process of what is and what is not ok to post online anonymously.
Like, I could see some merit in convincing people that they aren't "allowed" to post anonymous criticism as a means of quieting bad press.
I'm not trying to be slanderous or have a hit piece. They've clearly been immensely succesful (much more than me!). However, there is a veneer around Patrick and Stripe that needs to be broken. So many founders and employees look up to a false image that has been purposely crafted and is completely false. I'm not going to say that Patrick and John are bad people - but they're definitely not good, honest or kind. And they are definitely not who their online profiles, hn and the media would portray. Is an anonymous post the best way to show this - absolutely not, so down for other ideas.
[0] https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/11-big-things-the-35b-st...
Be it professional or social, many people are disadvantaged in their ability to express their opinions freely without retaliation, and any “you have nothing to hide or you’re just a coward” attitude only comes off as insensitive to others.
So far so good...
> I would make sure to include proofs.
Why do you imagine GP's comments could be made public under their own name if they included proof, given the concerns they have put forward? Their company could still be ruined by Stripe afterward, no amount of proof will change that. A court cannot force them to accept payment traffic as long as they pretend to refuse them for a different reason.
> If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.
This is how dictators and other perpetrators of abuse stay in power. In essence, you are colluding with them by keeping what they do a secret on purpose.
However, with forums, I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe having verified accounts reporting on behalf of anonymous accounts, because the current way, I just have to trust an anonymous account and with how easy it is to defame people anonymously because of no ultimate accountability, I tend to view anonymous posts skeptically. With the journalist way, there isn't anonymity but rather veiled identity, because it's ultimately traceable.
Hard to give proof on this, so I understand how everything needs to get taken with a grain of salt. The only thing I can say is to talk (or just email) any fintech company founder in the states and I'm 100% sure they will privately agree with what I've posted.
Especially considering these are corroborating messages (two of them), I am quite fine with this.
As a leader of a competing company, attaching your name to messages like those would be quite the bold and risky act (and likely not in line with duties to investors and shareholders, etc.)
How can you treat it as "insider scoop" if there is no way to tell whether the facts are true or the person is what who they claim to be?
Would you accept that level of journalism? We can see what journalism does to society when you forgo any checks on the fact or the provenance. Just watch Fox News and come back to tell what you think about it.
If you are taking unsubstantiated, anonymous posts as facts you are just easy to manipulate.
Perhaps for someone in a small town who’s brain is half dead unsubstantiated facts become reality but I’m hoping to be in a place where I’m afforded more freedom to form my own opinions on things from what others say.
There are studies that show that most people think they are resistant to marketing ads.
There are also studies that show that ads are effective on almost everybody.
> I’m hoping to be in a place where I’m afforded more freedom to form my own opinions on things from what others say
It is not the problem with freedom to form your opinions, it is the problem with the process of forming those opinions.
Unfortunately, most people form their opinions by accepting "facts" that already agree with what they know, feel or believe and by refusing most of what is conflicting with it.
And this thread shows this. People are already suspicious of the person or the company and so they will gladly skip the logical process and accept as facts something that is not even hearsay (hearsay still requires that you have a person testifying they heard something, which we don't have here because the poster is anonymous).
If I were a Stripe investor I would honestly be validated that the leadership is acting so boldly in the company's favor.
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.
An excuse as old as censorship.
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.
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.
> “He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” he told CNN. “It had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like.
Somehow, this part gets left out from this discussion.
Musk made specific accusations after the victim of his libel threatened to sue.[1] It wasn't school yard banter.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
Disgusting person.
The place was already a media circus but Elon decided to involve himself anyway and complicate the situation because he read about it in the news?
So when the actual heroes of the story are asked questions about the annoying tech billionaire who wanted to try out one of his 'new toys' in such a high pressure situation, they didn't mince words. It was a stupid idea, and he said as much.
Apparently this hero (and I mean HERO, not some cliche) was supposed to be more diplomatic to the sensitive self serving tech billionaire who injected himself into the story, did nothing but promote his own image and then slandered the actual people who performed the rescue.
A few examples off the top of my head:
Never mind the stuff he does to his own employees, especially whistleblowers.In fact it would be contrary to his personality if he didn't send an e-mail to the founders with a message like "Does this person work at Stripe?" with the tweet attached, making it clear what he wants done without explicitly saying it so he can pretend to have plausible deniability.
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/14646864235969454...
That’s the world’s richest person demonstrating willingness to go to some lengths just to get the last word in against some random webcomic author. Yes, I can totally believe they’d be petty enough to complain about online snark to someone’s employer. Doesn’t mean it necessarily happened, but it wouldn’t be that far out of character if it did.
Btw, I'm exaggerating, but still.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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_.
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.)
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.
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-...
Both of these comments were posted almost three hours after the initial post. So, in a 10 minute window 3 hours after the post, we are to believe a second commenter came to HN, saw temp7536's post (presumably after reading OP's narrative?), registered their own fake HN account, verified said account, and wrote a two paragraph post that almost exactly mirrored the original accusations of temp7536? Ok.
I have better things to do than Sherlock Holmes a case involving an individual (pc) who I have never met or spoken to, but there is much to be desired in the credibility dept for temp7536 and temp3728.
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?
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...
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?
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
I hope he means me.
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'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.
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).
[0] http://paulgraham.com/mean.html
[1] http://paulgraham.com/safe.html
[2] http://paulgraham.com/relres.html
[3] http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html
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.
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.
That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.
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.
What about "assume bad intentions"?
See “Fundamental Attribution Error”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
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?
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.
> 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.
Me neither. That sounds like hell!
Sounds like a recipe for a successful forum.
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.
Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.
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
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.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
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
- “Did Patrick request that you write this post?”
- “Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?”
Is a pretty direct question and barmstrong gave a direct answer. It's possible that temp7536 and barmstrong simply had different experiences with Patrick.
It seems to me that barmstrong wanted to share their experience.
Unless you have more information than I do, I really don't understand how that is an example of divisiveness. Picking sides is a great way of being divisive.
If they picked a side, people would've also left the company because they disagreed with the side that was picked. Which would mean that the company culture will become that side. People who think differently will be discouraged to join the company because they don't want to work for a company with stand points they disagree with. A company like that will possibly end up blind to whatever the 'other side' thinks. That's how you end up with Juicero.
I don't think every organization should be apolitical by default. But there really is a point to being apolitical as an organization, especially in the Crypto market, since there are so many different reasons for people supporting Crypto, any political stand point might cause you to lose customers.
Ah yes, surely the reason you didn't create the most valuable YC company ever is because more was done for Stripe.
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.
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.
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.
Genuine question.
...I gave up on my first.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.
Bitcoin will never lock your funds, suspend your account, and since it works perfectly, you don't need support at all.
Seriously. I am a fan of some crypto coins because in contrast to bitcoin there is actually future-proof concepts, but this "you will never face any consequences" advertising is delusional and would only work in a perfect alternative reality where everone acts in the interest of society.
Also https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html
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.
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.
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 agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.
I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.
(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)
TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.
I've seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a "$XB fintech" is?
This one means a >unicorn
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350
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.
Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
> Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
That explains why I thought they were gone for good.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-175041...
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.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?
Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It's none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.
This is a sign that an organization is doing too many fucking interviews. When you get scheduled for an interview every day of the week, you are quite literally forced to stop caring about the impact of cancelling interviews last minute. The recruiters may try to find an alternate interviewer, but often the candidate gets shafted. I never realized how common forcing the candidate to reschedule was (I had never experienced it while interviewing) but it happens to probably half a dozen candidates per day at my 600 person company.
Stripe notoriously went through a “hyper growth” (doubling headcount year over year when already past several hundred employees) phase for a number of years. That is an unspeakable torture to subject an organization to.
You beg for acceptance when you need the money. Companies smell your desperation. When you have a job, you can be picky.
But I wouldn’t go out and interview a lot unless I was planning or willing to leave.
But once a year it’s probably a good idea to do it to keep from getting rusty. It also helps keep a healthy perspective that you actually can change jobs if you wanted to.
I wouldn't be in an interview where I'm trying to impress the interviewer because that would imply that I'm shooting in the dark for the job, and I frankly don't have the time for that. Not trying to say my time is oh so special, but I have 4 young kids and a track record.
If I had to find a job today, I would use my network to source opportunities and also would find ways to reach leaders at companies I admire. I'm senior in my career now, but this is what I did when I was at the mid-level, too.
I also heard that attrition is really high and work-life balance non-existent.
So maybe I was lucky in this case.
1. when you're first contacted by a recruiter, company provides a written set of values/principles that the company expects from its recruiters and staff, contact info if you feel the company didn't live up to these principles, or have a suggestion for how to improve the process.
2. tie x% of recruiter comp to good behavior, and y% of interviewers.
3. automatically send surveys to candidates (both accepted and rejected) and check to see if you feel they could've streamlined the process or made it more pleasant. Capture an NPS score. Offer a cash bonus thank-you and another for referring friends.
other ideas?
Definitely agree about the excess of complaining in this thread though. HN isn’t a good forum for discussions like this, but that’s probably more a social media problem than an HN problem.