This is a great example of how not to blog:

  - Challenge a blog post of a successful member of the community.
  - Wait 2 weeks before responding to that blog post.
  - Insult him as often as possible, in as many ways as you can.
  - Swear like a sailor.
  - Brag about swearing like a sailor.
  - Co-opt images that have nothing to do with your point.
  - Have no point.
  - Make sure some of those images are vulgar.
  - Use red letters.
  - Use green letters.
  - USE ALL CAPS.
  - Swear some more.
  - Argue with your only commenter.  (That oughta generate more feedback :-)
  - When all else fails, show your resume.

The other points are spot on though.

Thank you. I was blind, but now I can see...

Dave barely graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 1988, with a BS in Mathematical Sciences Engineering and a minor in frisbee, billiards, and foosball.

Foosball? I had no idea. I take it all back.

In the future all disagreements between foosball players should be settled on the table where they belong. Does Jason play?

I have to say, to hear Jason Fried defended like he is at the moment on this thread (considering his propensity for viciously attacking other people, including start-ups, via the popular 37S blog) is very weird.

re: the 2-week delay, as one other person noted i was leading a group of ~20 entrepreneurs & investors around europe for http://GeeksOnaPlane.com and decided to wait until getting back home to pen the rebuttal.

anyway, my style isn't for everyone. hopefully some folks found it useful. if not, then hey at least it made for some entertainment this morning.

peace out,

It's not a matter of liking it or not. It's just that your style overwhelmed your message so much that I had trouble discerning what it actually was.

For anyone who didn't know about GeeksOnAPlane (me), it looked like you were reaching back for something to pick on. Two weeks here is like two years anywhere else.

I often use your suggestion of cutting and pasting difficult to read blogs (mainly because of color or resolution), but I was having so much fun with yours, I didn't even think of it.

I'll run your content through my parser and de-fucker and read it again. It won't be as much fun, but maybe I'll learn something :-)

(btw, it's been my experience that when people find something fun, they are more likely to spend time educating themselves on what they're having fun about ;)

Not really, I found it quite entertaining, and agreed with most of it. It was certainly a better blog post than most of the stuff that comes out of 37signals (IMHO).

-When all else fails, close rant with offer to buy said successful community member a beer

Its a famous technique, and very effective. To attract attention be a troll.

The man brings up interesting points regarding the Mint.com merger and how 37signals handled the news, f-bombs be damned. Especially in regards to the differing metrics of incentives for startups, VCs and preexisting competitors.

Saying that the VCs forced Aaron to sell is an absolutely ludicrous statement.

People get confused between what the right thing is for a company's customers or the "ecosystem" and what the right thing is for the entrepreneur (even taking account of the other two).

As a Mint user I'm really sorry Mint sold to Intuit. I also think it is a bit of a waste for the ecosystem as Mint was positioned to do something pretty amazing that probably won't happen now.

However, the decision was very sensible indeed for the founder. Mint may never have sold, he could have been ousted as CEO. Now he's a great bet for future investors and employees and he is cash independent (both as an individual and an investor).

Knowing when to stick and when to twist is invaluable. I am interested though why the VC's cash him out $20M and keep in the game as Matt Mullenweg's did. That way he would have hedged his risk and everyone swings for the fences.

Style is an indicator of content. If someone uses five different colors and five different ways to emphasize text (I'm not exaggerating: count them) in the first few paragraphs of a blog post, then I expect the content to be equally lacking in thought.

These 'interesting points' have already been made a zillion times by a zillion different persons in the time since the Mint acquisition. Instead of shortly restating the argument, he seems to think he needs to repeat it a number of times in a row, with small variations. This certainly doesn't deserve the term 'essay'.

Have your expectations ever been proven wrong? I try to keep an open mind and pay more attention to the message than the messenger. I must say it's given me a few pleasant surprises (because I am not a buddha and naturally still have prejudices).

That said, I can see the humor in answering a post with a very provocative title in an even more provocative way.

It's just that I think that delivering the message is more important than the 'lol' factor, and maybe in this case the message is important enough that it would have been better served by some more moderate language.

Sure, we're all adults and so on, I'm no shrinking violet myself but I would think twice before writing like that. It's simply not conducive to getting your point across.

And, that's a fact, the points are pretty good. Even if Jason Frieds original article gets misrepresented a bit.

Jason brought that on himself by making his point in a vacuum, after all he had no idea of the backstory, so he shouldn't have used it as the main point of support for his argument.

The trouble now is that Jasons original argument is threatened to be lost because of that, and that's a pity because it too had merit.

Hard for a web 2.0 pimp: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/02/its-hard-out-he....

And in general seems to be a big proponent of that really tired "Im a rockstar ninja coder because I write facebook apps in rails" attitude. ( http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/kottke-is-wrong.... )

For someone who is a self-styled "master of 500 hats", he could work to be at least a 5 or 6 in writing and text layout.

for me, both entrepreneurship & technology are about passion. to remove that passion from my writing would seem to miss the point.

Dave can be very blunt sometimes.

I saw him on a panel earlier this year and he's just very direct. It's refreshing to get very honest answers. Some people just play too nice just not to offend anybody.

Direct is bluntly and baldly stating claims that people find offensive and outrageous. You don't need to throw in extra invective on top of that.

See what I mean?

It's got to be 2-3x the length of Jason's original post ... and poorly written

Bend over may refer to the action of bending one's body over, as in to pick up something, or, for example, as the hydra does in order to move when hunting, in dancing (like in the various breakdance moves), gymnastics, and sports (like snap football), as well as to be (vaginally or anally) penetrated in sexual activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_over

so even if you took bend over literally there's nothing wrong (or anything implying anal sex) in saying that Mint guys bent over to pick-up Intuit's offer.

and while Jason Fried has actually added value by using such provocative but eloquent metaphor, Dave McClure has totally subtracted any little value that was in his rant by obscuring it with fucks etc.

i don't need to apologize for swearing... and similarly, you don't have to perform semantic acrobatics to find a different definition for "bending over".

jason certainly meant the headline in a "don't drop the soap" fashion, just like i meant to use the word "fuck" for emphasis.

get over yourself and get off your victorian soapbox. people swear. they've been doing it for hundreds of years.

if you can't get past the use of either as a literary form of emphasis, then you're the one being juvenile.

Successfully selling out makes it ridiculously easy to raise money, strike partnerships, and do things your way the second time around. Hell, it probably gets you a third bite at the apple as well.

What flipping does is to allow the entrepreneurs to pass a company off to the maintainers once it moves beyond that startup phase

Dave is one of the most savvy investors and marketers around. When we were first pitching Twilio no one seemed to understand "marketing to developers" but he got it while half asleep from an all-nighter.

If you curious about Dave's geek cred, scope his linkedin profile: * Investment Program Director at fbFund Incubator * Investor at Bit.ly * Investor at DailyBurn * Advisor at Life360 * Startup Investor (FF Angel Fund, fbFund Incubator) at Founders Fund * Advisor, Investor at Twilio * Organizer & Founder at Startup2Startup * Advisor at 750 Industries * Advisor, Angel Investor at SlideShare * Advisor, Angel Investor at TradeVibes * Advisor, Angel Investor at EventVue * Advisor, Angel Investor at Oortle * Angel Investor at RichRelevance * Advisor, Angel Investor at KISSmetrics * Advisor, Angel Investor, Boardmember at TeachStreet.com * Advisor, Consultant, Angel Investor at Mint Software * Advisor, Angel Investor at Mashery * Advisor at Kiva.org * Co-Founder, Boardmember at Silicon Valley Microfinance Network * Advisor, Angel Investor at Simply Hired * Angel Investor at Canopy Financial * Startup Advisor / Angel Investor at 500 Hats LLC

And, if you head hasn't exploded from the colors in his blog check out his presentation style... in. your. face. http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

Some good points got lost because of that.

Young Entrepreneurs Should Sell Out Early

I did that - not because I was forced but because the deal was good and I have plenty of other ideas to turn into countries. And I agree: it's a good thing.

In fact I sold my second company - the first one crashed and burned. It was a useful experience because the oulay costs were 4 figure amounts and I had no employee's - so no one really lost out.

Now I feel like I have had the right experiences and can make better decisions next time.

Too often I think we see people offered vast sums of money with no idea really what to do with it. The successes we hear about are the multi-millionaires who make the right decisions (either through luck or skill) but Im sure there are plenty of others who failed.

Im glad I got the chance when the worst setback I could face is being back at square one.

It means that a startup has basically failed, that there may be some technology that can be recycled or that the founder has enough street creds that they can convert their failed startup into a signing bonus and call it an acquisition.

There are ways to express your point and influence people - dropping f-bombs like you just got into middle school is generally not one of them.

But at least you know how cool and edgy he is. Saying "fuck" in a blog post is totally sticking it to the man!

At any rate, when Jason states in his post that he "doesn't know the full backstory," that signaled to me that I'm reading a post that's based on a premise that could be completely wrong. And I was okay with that because Jason appropriately couched his post.

> A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

Ok, interesting. What does David have to say about that?

Actually, I wont post any quote from this article here because it's point is diluted by rambling, poor grammer and unnecessary profanity. Now, I'm usually the last person you'll see up in arms about swearing, afterall they're just fucking words. But it turns out words are best used to help get your point across not just for filling space (a lot of space, in this case).

Jason's article was short, succint, made a point and was pretty clear about where he was coming from. You might not agree with it, and I might not agree with it... that's fine. But we can read it and discuss, there's no reason to fly off the handle and swear at the guy.

Seriously, why so offended? Jason didn't say that Mint's sale was forced by the VC's, he was merely using his guess that it was to make a point about the current generation of startups... Namely the trend of aiming directly for the sellout instead of 'greatness'.

His post wasn't even about Mint, the news and his opinion of it just prompted it.

On the other hand this article is just plain vulgar, rude and doesn't add anything useful to the conversation.

    [1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bends-over

and while likely more than half of all acquisitions don't actually "work", enough do to make it worth doing.

David Cerny is a very cool artist overall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cerny

He makes some valid points, but this could have been written in a couple of paragraphs and without constant personal attacks. I'd like to see this guy hold his own in a one-on-one confrontation...

Maybe this could be arranged?

Well, that's certainly true...

> more transactions of any kind or size help improve overall startup ecosystem health.

While more transactions in theory improves market efficiency (throughout this post, I will be using efficiency informally), in practice this fact doesn't matter. In order for the number of transactions to have any meaningful impact on the actual efficiency of the venture capital markets, the number of transactions would have to increase by a lot, not by the occasional Mint.com here and there. Take this as informed speculation, but I don't even think a doubling of transactions would have a meaningful impact on the efficiency on the market, because of the severe restraints regarding information and transparency. To see how this plays out in practice, just imagine that you are marketing your company for a round of financing. You may know the valuations and terms of a handful of other investments (and none that are directly comparable, in all likelihood) essentially from word of mouth or from the experiences of advisors/banks/investors (who also don't have very good information) and use those as a very rough benchmark, but in the end that handful is not at all representative. Even if you double that handful, it still isn't representative, at least, not enough to persuade anyone much more of the correct value.

On the other hand, if companies were forced to make a regulatory filing that included 1. current revenue, 2. details on the round of financing (valuation, preferences, participation features, etc.), the effect would be much greater market efficiency even if number transactions stayed at the same level. The barriers are information-related rather than transaction-volume-related.

> In the long-run, it benefits all system participants for small transactions to occur, because it makes the overall market more knowledgeable -- this in turn, reduces risk and encourages greater investment... which also encourages greater (overall) returns.

Obviously you could argue this point either way (since there are a lot of definitions to play with in the above paragraph), but in truth, a more efficient, more liquid market doesn't benefit all system participants. It would certainly benefit entrepreneurs if there were greater transparency and efficiency, since they are definitely on the wrong side of information barriers.

Greater market transparency tends to DECREASE investment returns in that market, because it removes a source of risk (and risk and returns are inversely related). It would probably encourage greater investment, but that could be increased even more by other means, and given venture capital returns over the last decade, it is not clear that this would be a net benefit for the economy. Additionally, the more dollars invested, the worse returns will be generally speaking (more dollars chasing fewer good ideas). But, he uses the word overall, so maybe he means overall returns including returns to entrepreneurs rather than capital sources, but that gets into even more murky territory.

Just to be concrete, I'll give one example from another financial market. Prior to 2001, stocks traded in the US were traded in fractions of a dollar. The smallest quotation unit was 1/16, which means the smallest spread a market-maker would quote was 6.25 cents. The spread is how these firms make money. In exchange for always having shares available, they charge you (at least) 6.25 cents more for the share than they are willing to buy it from you. For decades, market-making was good business, but after decimal pricing was implemented, these spreads became much smaller, due to competition. Now, market-making activities are basically not a source of profit for financial firms. A regulation that lead to greater liquidity in the market was very much non beneficial to certain market participants, namely, market-makers (many of these were large institutions that you could argue benefited from bigger transaction volumes in other areas, but this is not always the case).