[andygcook]

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.

Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure?

From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.

--

[1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...

[DoreenMichele]

The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out

The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with.

Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better.

Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem.

Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem.

There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors.

(I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)

[golergka]

> Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions.

Sometimes it's not really tactics, it's often just a complete mental breakdown. I have founded a startup when I was 22, and completely not ready for something that would be so emotionally hard; it ended up in a a few months long depressive episode, during which I completely ghosted almost every person I knew.

Suffice to say, being emotionally and psychologically stable is one of the main traits for a CEO, and avoidance is often a very good "smell" of problems in that department.

[exolymph]

Why did this comment get downvoted? (It's currently somewhat greyed out.) Can someone who downvoted say what they found objectionable?

[nothrabannosir]

Wild guess but I'd be remiss not to express this saturnine suspicion: probably because it's Doreen. She posts a lot, mostly solid content like the above post, some of which hard hitting. Some people take offense, she's often greyed out for no reason and regularly gets pretty harsh criticism. I would be shocked if she doesn't have some auto downvotes for every post. Unfortunately.

I recognise it's not constructive to express this suspicion of sexism, except perhaps as a message of support, so hereby: Doreen, you have my +1. Ignore the haters.

[DoreenMichele]

There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.)

I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I do get quite a lot of them, but I have no data on what's "normal" -- are simply people who have no idea I'm a woman, don't think the way I do, don't have the background knowledge I have, can't see how it's pertinent and are unaware of me being someone with any particular expertise that anyone "should" respect or be interested in. (Edit: In fact, I fairly often get feedback that the person I'm arguing with assumed I was male simply because it is HN and HN is overwhelmingly male, which lefthandedly implies "Doreen blends and does not read as girly.")

In this case, the downvotes occurred after I added the qualifier that I don't have startup experience, so a very good guess is that it was downvoted by someone who thinks my knowledge of how people work doesn't apply and I'm just some blowhard and armchair politician who shouldn't have added "low value content" to HN. The degree to which I have formally studied people topics (negotiation, social psychology, etc) is something alien to a lot of STEM folks who see that as a soft science and not something you can really understand with any confidence.

There is a lot of hand-wavy BS in areas like psychology. I'm quite critical of such things myself, though it often doesn't go over well for me to do that either because the degree to which I think I understand a more bright line standard for how to study social phenomenon is also not seen by most people as anything believable.

On the upside, my latest parenting blog is something some people have expressed real interest in. That's an area of social expertise and it might eventually get real traction, unlike so many of my projects.

(Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.)

[Wowfunhappy]

> Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.

I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. Such conversations frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite type (in which the original poster complains) never does.

I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?

I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as completely unreasonable, but allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.

I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed... but maybe worth a try?

[Xelbair]

>> I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?

Even here people confuse downvotes with "i don't like it"s.

[samvher]

I actually don't have a problem with the original poster asking why they get downvoted either, I think there is often a learning opportunity in such a situation. What does annoy me is if the person then gets an explanation, but digs in, and it turns into a you're-wrong-I'm-right discussion, but to be honest I don't see that happening that often.

[tarsinge]

I don’t know, this doesn’t reflect my experience here. Either your comment is insightful or not.

For example regarding your previous comment, I found it interesting on the psychology topic, but slightly off topic regarding the subject. The discussion is about startups and investors as entities, not as persons, and the OP explicitly ask for information of someone with experience startup investors, specifically YC.

In short your comment is interesting but not relevant to the discussion. Personally I don’t downvote these kind of comments but I can understand other people do. Nothing to do with your background or how you think in my opinion.

[masonic]

  She posts a lot, mostly solid content

Actually, a majority of it is tweets, reddits, or her own blogs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=DoreenMichele

[DoreenMichele]

If you sort by most upvoted instead of most recent, you get a better idea of why I have been averaging about 1000k/mo with this handle for nearly two years straight:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=DoreenMichele

[kbenson]

> but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors

I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).