Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullContact

Re:Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullCon... by BigMan555 on Friday December 22, 2017 @04:34AM (#15986301)

The CEO of Mattermark spent a lot of time and energy in the early days of the company establishing a public presence as a brash, highly opinionated thought leader in the “how to run a start-up” intellectual space, which makes the failure of the company a little ironic and is almost certainly contributing to the Schadenfreud I’ve read on Twitter.

Take, for instance, this post, in which she seemingly boasts of the company’s massive burn rate: https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/is-my-startup-burn-rate-...

Or this post, in which she shames a number of “Zombie Unicorns” (including WeWork): http://www.businessinsider.com/mattermark-names-troubled-uni...

Why be so publicly hostile and truculent?

Also, it appears that the CEO lacked focus: according to her Twitter profile, she’s a VC and a very prolific angel investor. I’d be upset as an employee of the company receiving $0 for my common stock that the CEO was effectively hedging her Mattermark bet with a number of side gigs. The CEO’s job is to be singularly focused on the success of the company.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullCon... by lenley on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:06PM (#16023671)

That aggressiveness gets noticed and picked up by lots of different outlets -- from tech aggregators to mainstream business publications looking for "punchy" topics. E.g. look at who appears on CNBC programs.

Unfortunately, people have made that into a marketing strategy -- I'm not sure it is something to really hold against Mattermark in particular.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullCon... by minimaxir on Friday December 22, 2017 @01:00PM (#15989467)

Notably, there's been complaints that the TechCrunch article is too negative (https://twitter.com/sm/status/944087102982995969), which has the inverse problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullCon... by jpeg_hero on Friday December 22, 2017 @02:58PM (#15990430)

Yeah, unreal. Hey @sm give me $17m and I’ll give you $1m back and we’ll gauge your positivity/negativity.

This is the stuff that gives SV a bad reputation- the sense of entitlement. That of course we deserve “others people’s money” to do with what we please and should be praised for it.

This is real money @sm !!

[ Parent | on HN ]