[nemexy]

Can anyone please explain to me why a YC company is making such a terrible name for themselves at a website which is literally FULL with people, who they should aim at building positive image with. I am pretty sure that over 70% of their users have at least a username in this community. I hardly have ever seen a worse way to respond to a marketing crisis.

edit: Now the answer of the co-founder(you can find it below) is way better and it should have been the first reaction to this post. Hopefully there can be a happy result to both sides.

[austenallred]

Because the founders suck at dealing with users. YC doesn't run your company for you.

[tzs]

YC doesn't run your company for you, but a big point of YC is that they provide advice and guidance. As they say in an article [1] linked from the YC FAQ:

   Most people don’t do YC for the financial investment—they
   do it because they want the advice, the help of the
   network, the benefits of the program.

Heck, for a long time YC only invested something like $20k and got something like 7% of your company. From a money point of view, only a complete idiot would have taken that deal. What made it worthwhile was getting access to the YC people for advice.

Now YC gives $120k for 7%, so it is no longer completely idiotic from a purely monetary point of view, but even at $120k most of the value is in the access it gives you to the YC staff and the other people YC puts you in contact with.

Because of this a lot of people have higher expectations for YC companies.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal

[argonaut]

Are you suggesting YC can run your company for you? YC can exert pressure but that's it. They don't have any legal or corporate control whatsoever.

[tptacek]

Yes, but I had the same thought; along the lines of "does YC really have to do a dinner where someone comes in and tell the batch's founders not to try to make examples of customers/users that are annoying them, because they will look ridiculous at best and, as in cases like this, actively malignant at worst"? Is that really a lesson YC needs to teach?

[DanBC]

It doesn't need to be a dinner, but a nice blog post would possibly help. It's not as if this is the first boneheaded response from a YC funded company, and it's YC's name that gets linked to this sub-optimal behaviour.

That "break the rules" post got around. Maybe there needs to be a "but don't be a massive jerk to ex customers" follow up post.

[tedunangst]

I thought there was already a "no asshole" rule? But maybe it's one of the rules you're supposed to break.

[krapp]

At the very least, I would expect Y Combinator to try to invest in founders who don't need to be told that.

[tptacek]

People have crazy unrealistic expectations of YC in this regard. They invest in 30-40 teams per batch, based on an application and a very short interview. That's a good thing for founders, and whatever else you might think of them, YC is the probably the most founder-positive force in the entire technology industry.

They're investors, not chaperons.

[nemexy]

I really did not wanted to blame YC. My mention of them is mostly because they are the biggest incubator, so people who get in should have at least minimum amount of marketing skills. They literally make fool of themselves in front of their main "customers" and apparantly we are still talking about one of the cofounders. You are trying to run companies worth millions and do such stupid mistakes, it is just beyond understanding for me.

[austenallred]

I think it's because that doesn't scale to seventy companies without being a hinderance. I'm sure the skills are there, the problem is unless the founders ask UC doesn't know where to deploy them.

[benologist]

Founders of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Linux, Oracle, Tesla and probably many more have been famous for childish or angry stuff. It's not very uncommon.

[eli]

Jeff Bezos is allegedly a sometimes difficult person to work for, but Amazon treats its customers extremely well.