• Little Bobby Tables (unregistered)

    Frist comment scrapped because I've had a new idea

  • LCrawford (unregistered)

    As a parting gift to Jack, Ian left a can of Cruex.

  • Pjrz (unregistered)

    How do these people get investment money??

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    When your startup's entire business model is starting over, by definition you won't have a business for long. That said, I interviewed three times at a startup before I realized the business was actually a ponzi scheme.

  • Sally Flynn (unregistered) in reply to Pjrz

    For the same reason politicians get elected: they're really good at lying.

  • Karsten Bock (github) in reply to Sally Flynn

    I think it is more that voters are really bad at remembering anything that happened in the past. Granted, this only counts for those that get re-elected.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    What Sally just said. When you're a sociopath / psychopath, there is no difference between lying and telling the truth; no difference between reality and fantasy. Even you can't tell the difference. You say what you think will benefit you the most right now this moment. Period.

    I worked for somebody like that 15-20 years ago before mobile / cloud was the rage. We had a more consistent actual product (a user extensible intranet website), but the product's feature list was whatever the would-be customer asked about at the first presentation by our owner / boss / head salesman / uber psycho. And the feature growth continued at every presentation or phone call later for the life of that prospect / customer.

    He was charismatic, but once you broke his code he was pretty simple. If the customer said or asked it, the answer was always "Yes!". If his employees said or asked it, the answer was always "No; just no." We had a dozen devs and he could invent a man-year's worth of new features in a long day. And often did. The good news is his attention span was short enough that he often forgot about them. The only problems arose when the customers didn't forget what they'd been promised.

    We did have real revenue from the real product, but the code churn ate up most of the profits.

    I was very glad when I moved on.

  • Daniele (unregistered)

    Is this a new episode of "Silicon Valley"?

  • (nodebb) in reply to WTFGuy

    I've seen people like this. They consider themselves once-in-a-lifetime geniuses and are VERY good at selling snake oil and hoodwinking people stupider than they are (i.e. VCs and angel investors) to put money into their product. They do exactly what is done here: Piss all the money away on nonsense while not delivering anything, and in this case, constantly scrapping ideas just shows that the founder really isn't as smart as he thinks.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    If there's one thing I've learnt working for other people it's that making money running your own business has almost nothing to do with being good at running the business, and everything to do with bringing in the work. You can fool some of the people all of the time.

  • Hasseman (unregistered) in reply to Daniele

    Sillycon Valley?

  • P (unregistered)

    This is what you call "agile" development, right? It can cope with these changes...

  • James (unregistered)

    When venture capital was willing to light billions of dollars on fire just to find that one diamond in the rough. Just like the old American West Gold Rush, lots of Jack's appeared and failed miserably.

  • (nodebb)

    Ok, so I guess it's an earner until redundancy happens.

    'Jack insisted Ian stay late with them to "show solidarity."' 'Ian put in his two weeks.'

    Nevermind. Probably for the best.

  • Groz (unregistered)

    A daft, intrusive, data-mining "crapp" dies an ignoble, stillborn death?

    I do love me a happy ending!

  • TruePony (unregistered)

    "If they come, you will build it" - Jack

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that Ian stayed on that long and didn't leave much sooner.

  • Klaus (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    Student loan?

  • Charvell (unregistered)

    I kept thinking of Pixelon while reading this article, except or course Michael Fenne/David Kim Stanley was a straight up con man who stole the basics of someone's tech and tried to pass it off as his own. I'm sure Jack just thought of himself as the next Zuckerburg or Musk.

  • Decius (unregistered)

    The real customer was the investors, who got taken for the ride of a lifetime.

  • Schily (unregistered)

    Wow, so they got distracted from re-inventing the Yamaha Bodibeat? (I admit I found the concept very interesting, 15 or so years ago.)

  • Gordon JC Pearce (github)

    This sounds exactly like a company I worked for in the early 2000s - posh office in a business incubator park in central Scotland, masses of money poured into kit, flood-wiring our office in the building even though there was already networking in place so we would have our own patch panel, building a couple of internal "offices" and a "server room" in the huge building, and every few months just as something was just about ready to take live a massive shift in direction requiring even more money for even more kit.

    I reckon someone had about four million quid they needed to just not have any more, possibly for tax reasons.

  • I dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (unregistered)

    "Real artists ship." - Steve Jobs

  • (nodebb)

    I nearly fell over when I saw the "drop the music part and focus solely on data collection" genius idea. Without the music part, why would people download the app in the first place?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Medinoc

    Because it's such a great app! It's so fantastic, everybody will want to have it!

    ... according to Jack, and nobody else ever.

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