Why don't more start-ups/entrepreneurs/devs grow a pair of balls on issues?

2 points by wyck 14y ago ↗ HN

So this recent battle over SOPA and Godaddy as far as I can tell had 4 outstanding people that made a stand in the tech community.

Ycombinator - Paul Graham

Wikipedia - Jimmy Wales

Cheezburger - Ben Huh

Imgur - Alan Schaaf

That is to say they did't just regurgitate an anti-sopa tweet, but actually made an official statement and acted towards something they believed in.<p>What surprises me is that those are the only 4 I know offhand, the rest of the tech community, especially those build and promote open source initiatives, have remained standing in the shadows (some of which register thousands of domains through godaddy).

So what gives, there seems to be a problem here, SOPA certainly is not the only issue at hand and I don't mean to make anyone into a hero, but the balls...., where are they?

1 comment

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nostrademons 14y ago ↗

Because startups typically have a lot of "issues" that are much closer to their business that they need to pay attention to, and can't afford to waste attention on bills that are only tangentially related to them. When you're two breaths away from dying, you pay attention to not dying in two breaths, not to not dying in a couple of years.

SOPA is pretty bad. It will kill a large number of startups should it pass. But running out of cash, or not building a product, or not finding any users for that product will kill a large number of startups way before SOPA can. That's why it's fallen largely on established businesses to fight SOPA.