Edit: example of HN crowd sympathetic to a postmortem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608
You can’t raise a round with an acquisition pending, so you kind of have to put yourself in a precarious position. Perhaps they could have done something else, but hindsight is 20/20.
- They didn't pay contractors for months of work
- They gave no hints to anyone that they were running out of funds
- They agreed to stop looking for acquisitions while in discussions, without requiring a bailout penalty clause in exchange
- $45m for a lock? Where the heck did it all go? Elon Musk's initial investment in Tesla was $6m in 2004.
I assume you benefit from Hacker News, since you're a user here and a welcome one. But if you're benefitting from it, please take care of it, the same way you wouldn't litter in a city park or set fire to one.
If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html you'll get an idea of the intended spirit of the site. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do; assume good faith, and please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful.
Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everything and be right 90% of the time and think you’re a genius. The thing that makes Silicon Valley work is that the times when you’re are what really matter. If you say Facebook is overvalued at $3 Billion (as most of HN agreed) you could easily be wrong not just 1x, but 100x.
The world would be much better off with more people trying and failing while using hyperbolic language than having more trolls throwing parties on their graves. There’s absolutely no shortage of the latter.