Hey all,Been looking at accelerator applications recently and wanted to get advice from the HN community.I have a startup that i've been working on full-time for the last 1.5+ years. While the business has great engagement #'s, it currently does not have a very large user base (in the few thousands) and the startup is facing tough business issues. On top of that, I applied to YC with the same...
FULL explanation: It comes down to the unrestricted access that was granted. It introduces a person with extreme power but carries no responsibility with regards to work or culture. The end result is what we have today. This type of culture is actually very prevalent in asian companies (where families have unrestricted access) and have been demonstrated to be extremely detrimental. Theresa Preston-Werner blog post is extremely telling where she says "I have many close friends at GitHub, and I certainly had reached out to them when I began to build my company". My wife made the same mistake at her first job (trying too hard to be friends), except that she was an individual contributor and not the wife of the CEO. Her co-workers could just tell her off and she quickly learned the balances that were necessary. It's obvious that Theresa had no experience of this kind and had too much power for people to say "no".
I want to add, I think there was an overfocus on gender issues by all parties (victims, plantiffs, media & company) in the first place. When I read the original article, I felt that regardless of the incident, Julie Ann Horvath was just pulling out the gender card. This was a mistake since it gave Github an easy way out to simply deny the gender-based accusations without any wrong doing.
The right thing to do would be to ask Upshot to submit ALL their code and add it to Salesforce.com. I think most of the other participants would consider that fair justice.
Just wanted to point out: Although the title/article emphasizes d3, I think additional emphasis should be put on PhantomJS. There are a lot of complexities with implementing a headless browser. Libraries, such as Rhino and Selenium, have fallen short. PhantomJS really has created a nice balance for developers.
But given the comments above, it seems likely that the issue wasn't a result of lack of power/gas. Interested to find out what failed with the preparations.