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from the You-can't-get-there-from-here dept.
[Ed note: I debated whether or not to run this story. On the one hand, it rather thoroughly eviscerates a particular company, and I truly wish no harm to other's ventures. (Seeing what it takes to run this site, well, it's not as easy as it looks!.) On the other hand, it rather handily illustrates management issues I have seen before. On the gripping hand, I found the submission to be entertainingly written, and that tipped the scales for me: I decided to give it a try... and see what the community thinks. Have you ever worked at a company like this? How did that work out for you? Did the company successfully reinvent themselves? --martyb]
WhenHub - a startup in search of an idea
As near as I can recall, the initial idea of WhenHub was that you could create a Whencast, which is basically a slideshow with slides shown in chronological order. You were supposed to embed this Whencast on your website. Aside from the sheer triviality of the idea, the embedding meant that visitors had to allow 3rd party cookies, so it didn't work for anyone with sensible security settings on their browser.
So they moved on: Next, they had an app that would let you share your location data with friends. For example, if you were heading to a meeting, and someone hadn't arrived yet, you could see that they were stuck in traffic (or maybe at the beach). Not a bad idea, but again trivial, and really better implemented by the mapping applications. Which they have done.
Somewhere along the way, they also talked about calendar sharing, but I never looked into the details. Anyway, you can share calendars just fine, from all sorts of different services, so...
So you have this startup, only none of your ideas are actually marketable, and money is running out. Whatever do you do? Ah, but now! Now they have a totally different idea. They will let you hire people, with contracts. But this isn't like any of the zillion freelancer sites around, no! WhenHub is different: They have sprinkled "magic blockchain dust" on their company.
They'd really like to do an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), but the regulators look like they are going to crack down on that. So they're offering a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens). Really important: this is totally not an investment, because that might be subject to regulation, even though they keep talking about "investment", but anyway it isn't, because you don't get any equity in the company, or in Scott's apartment, or even a walk-on in a Dilbert strip.
Instead, you give them your money, and you get a non-transferable "SAFT", which maybe they will someday exchange for "WHEN tokens", which might someday be redeemable for, well, something, if the regulators don't outlaw it. And remember, it's totally not an investment, so...um... Why was it they expect people to send them money?
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I know, this is cynical as hell, but WTF? Is this the culture of startups, to throw ideas at the wall, hoping and praying that something - anything - turns out to be vaguely marketable? Then seeing Scott Adams, who otherwise seems like a decent enough fellow, hawking this SAFT on his blog. Whatever the truth, it sure looks like he's trying to bail out his bad investment by finding a bunch of suckers. That's just sad...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:41PM (3 children)
I'll grant you that it is typical startup behavior.
Especially for young people, who have had "success" handed to them all their short lives by the efforts and wallets of their parents. Many, if not most, have never put in the effort to learn either their craft, or the art of running a business. They just expect all that theory and a mashup of random tools they saw while obtaining their CS degrees to be instantly rewarding. Life seldom works that way. A degree equips you to START learning. Its a prerequisite to the school of hard knocks.
But I draw the line at that "that can lead to success" part.
That just doesn't really happen. Almost all startups operating this way are thrashing. Doomed to failure. These are not the startups that succeed. These are the first baby steps, the first lessons in the school of hard knocks. These are the breakups waiting to happen, the former friends and business partners discarded along the way, the years of living off parents, and day jobs so you can hack all night only to find its never going anywhere. This can only be said to LEAD to success if you can follow the one or two people that eventually come out with a totally different company, with totally different partners, doing totally different things. Just don't look too carefully at the body count of discarded people and dreams along the way. Everybody remembers Bill Gates. Tim Paterson is lost to history. [quora.com]
I also have reservations about the "taken ideas that already exist and made them work" part.
That too only works if the market is really small and there are not many (or any) established players in the field. For every Musk, there is a John DeLorean, and five thousand guys that never got past the welding torch in their own garage.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @05:41PM (1 child)
Actually, this is more like it:
Almost all startups ... are ... Doomed to failure.
Such is the way it works in startup land. Almost all of them will fail. That tiny percentage that survive, well, after the fact folks will back fill their opinions such that the believe that X survived because it had such a wonderful idea, when in reality it was just the random one who managed to get through the 0.001% survival filter.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 01 2017, @05:49PM
It's more like 10-20% with better odds for companies run by people who've done it before. Then it's similar odds to get to a company with significant wealth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 01 2017, @05:47PM
So what? Paterson did fine, unless you're thinking that one has to make tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth in order to qualify as successful?