[mlinsey]

I agree with you up until your last paragraph "a startup was probably the worst endeavor for them". The sheer gumption to throw yourself whole-heartedly at problems you are unqualified to solve is one of the most important characteristics of a startup founder. Even if you spent time learning to be a great coder, there would be a dozen other things you'd need to be doing for the first time when you first start a startup. Rather than spending a bunch of time learning in industry, it's just as well to just try it when you are young and have less to lose.

Diaspora is also a somewhat unusual case. For most consumer web startups, the back button is a much bigger threat than security vulnerabilities in the early stages. Once you've iterated a lot have a better idea of what you're actually building, one of the first steps is usually to hire coders who are much better than you. In Diaspora's case, it's unclear to me whether their vision is a business or an open-source project - in the latter case then having stronger coders lead the effort is more important.

[code177]

I wholeheartedly agree with you, if the fact was as simple. As it stands, the paragraph should have read: "a startup [with $200,000 funding of other people's money] was probably the worst endeavor for them", as that more accurately represents the reality of the situation.

[mlinsey]

I don't think funding changes the situation either - if anything they could have used even more money so they could hire someone more senior that would help guide their development.

Perhaps the problems also lie in the expectations of those giving money. I assure you that few experienced angel investors would have been upset or surprised that the college kids they gave $200K to produced code that was messy or had some bad security problems in the early stages. They would be a lot more concerned with how the founders planned on getting adoption for their fledgling service, or whether they were iterating on the product quickly enough. It seems that many who have donated to Diaspora (or who are getting upset on behalf of other people who donated to Diaspora) have different expectations. '

Just today I was playing with the product of a company in the just-ended YC batch. I found I was able to delete someone else's posted content on the site trivially easily. While I'm sure PG wouldn't be exactly happy to hear about this, he sure as heck wouldn't think that the founders should have spent more time learning to code in industry before taking his money to build a startup. He'd just tell them to fix it (and it's probably fixed by now), and then move on to more important questions like whether they were getting more users and building the right features.

[djhworld]

I think the problem with Diaspora is that it received much attention from the media (during the Facebook privacy issue being top of the agenda for most tech/mainstream news bulletins)

Whether that media campaign was orchestrated by the developers, or their investors, or just surfaced naturally as some news stories tend to do, I think this attention didn't really help matters when it came to putting a group of inexperienced graduates together to create what potentially should be a rival to a multi billion dollar company in one summer.

They should have been given more time and let to lead more of a low profile than the charade that's taken place over the past few months