[jstuder]

We think that funding young people and their ideas is an important thing to do. And frankly, $216k is a reasonable amount for what retickr is trying to accomplish (cutting the noise out of social media overload). Will they fail? probably. Is it the job of venture capitalists to fund that failure? We damn sure think so.

Is $216k a year a smarter initial investment than $41m for an experienced team of entrepreneurs? (see Color). Or $30m for a wiki based company that pivots into gossip? (see Wetpaint).

For the money that was invested in Color (and any number of other startups run by "experienced" management teams), we could theoretically start 80 retickrs (assuming 2 years of burn rate for retickr). Or over 1,000 YC companies.....

Retickr is making mistakes, some of which we, their investors, warned them against. But a good investor doesn't dictate to entrepreneurs, we mentor and guide. If we wanted to be the CEO of a startup, we would do that. We’re trying to leverage our experience. And assuming a de facto role as CEO at each of our portfolio companies is the exact antithesis of scaling. At least until we figure out cloning or consciousness replication....#ss11

Btw, thanks to the whole community here, you’re doing an amazing job of creating a healthy environment where crazy people like Travis who are willing to put themselves out there in the open can get honest and productive feedback. Kudos

[devs1010]

I just look at it from an engineering perspective, having worked for some companies where the code base was just "hacked" together, in an unmaintainable way and I just sometimes think it would be better for the tech community as a whole if everyone and their mother didn't try to start a company with little experience ( a few years down the line, sure go start one, no problems with that), sure they may have some minor success but it just exacerbates bad development practices and these young companies usually hire more unexperienced developers and the effect just snowballs. I am talking from my own experiencing working with "post-startup" companies that were a few years old to where I am just glad I have continued learning on my own (reading online, reading books, etc) as anti-patterns and bad practices that can occur without experienced dev's on a team can really cause problems.

In the interest of full disclosure, before I got really into software development / programming, I too had a lot of ideas, wanted to start my own companies (even tried to do so with some small ecommerce stores, etc) but overall I'm glad I didn't succeed with that because it forced me to learn development and realize just how hard and involved making a scalable web app really is and if I ever go on to make a real serious attempt at creating a new company (not for a few years at least) I think I would be in a better position to make a real contribution and make something that is technically sound and viable.