For a business purposes, part of the benefit of "that family thing" is that it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond.
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
>it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond.
Employees should jump ship if the business sucks. It shouldn't matter how nice the owners are to you, if the business itself is no good, you shouldn't stay around and support it.
Oh wow I disagree with this totally. One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here? Anyone who has ever appeared in a story in the news (I have multiple times) knows they always get things wrong and always angle to story to what they think is something interesting that will allow them to sell advertising. That is the business they are in. With all due respect to Jessica (who I don't know) this sounds to me very thin skinned and not exactly an example of overcoming adversity in the entrepreneurship world. Of course it's her right to not do interviews if she doesn't feel like doing them but the way PG presents the story it's as if this one incident was enough to sour her taste (and there were no other factors at play).
Edit: As would be expected say something (not delicately or gently enough) about anyone closely associated with YC and get downvoted. Maybe that's just because people will pay attention to the comment more and tend to react more emotionally than rationally.
Edit#2: As far as those who say "YC is successful Jessica doesn't need to be in the limelight it's important to realize that people read these essays who are not in that position. Or even close. So perhaps PG could have pointed that out in a more direct way so that those learning from his writings could understand the nuance of the decision.
> One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here?
Character? It's clear from PG's essay that she hates being in the limelight. What was very likely her worst fear about doing PR happened straight away. It's completely understandable that an incident like that would have had her just back away from it all as fast as possible. Especially when it's something she doesn't have to do.
Hey. I also hate being in the limelight. But if it's good for business I get over it and have. Just like I get over many things that I need to do in business to make it work. (I have cleaned toilets and done grunt work and still take out the trash. I do things with my wife in personal life that I hate to do in order to have a good relationship as well as I am sure everyone does).
It is not good for business. Journalists almost invariably corrupt any message one is trying to deliver. The return, on time and energy invested, ranges from "very poor" to "negative". It is the worst kind of market engagement, rarely attracting more than a herd of tyre-kickers. Good luck generating qualifiable leads from press coverage.
Sorry to hear that Jessica learned this the shittiest possible way. I had it easier, being simply misquoted on two occasions and seeing the pattern.
NB: Analysts are slightly better, because they take time to understand market structures, technology trends and value chains. This is because people pay them for information, rather than for column filler. It is not a coincidence that really good PR people move up to AR where they may actually see some benefit for their efforts.
Some people like climbing mount everest, others like giving speeches, others still like flying planes, driving fast cars.
You have 5 fingers on your hand and they are all different sized. Expecting them to all be the same is imbecile.
She didn't want PR for its own sake. She wanted to get a message out, and the tech press was less interested in the message than in how many clicks they could milk out of any drama involving YC.
Well perhaps she learned a lesson that if you are going to "lead" with a tasty vignette like that the rest of your message will be lost. So it's a lesson learned, right? Next interview she would perhaps not do the same thing and simply save the story for PG.
It might be easier to think of it as a lesson learned. It's likely obvious to everyone (Jessica included) that the media can't be implicitly trusted, but the true nature and impact of interacting with the media in that way may have not been completely apparent until that article happened. It's completely reasonable for Jessica to say "if these are the sorts of articles I can expect, and have to fight against, then the cost is not worth the benefit".
The issue is not liability. It's whether there is a leg to stand on to get sued for this. In this case there is a leg to stand on to get sued. And in that case it's time and money to defend, assuming insurance does not cover this of course.
"then their professional liability insurance would protect them from the fall-out of sloppy workmanship"
Assumes the homeowner checks that the insurance for the professional is valid at the point the repair is made. Of course nobody does that. (They ask and are told they are insured. Maybe on a large project but on a small repair?)
Along those lines I have a doctor that is practicing in a property that I own (commercial). As part of the lease (as with all tenants that I have) they are required to provide not only proof of insurance but to add my LLC as a named insured to the policy and provide what is known as an ACCORD certficate (as proof). They do have the insurance (I have seen the policy) but even after 2 months I have not been able to get them to get their agent to provide the ACCORD cert. So what am I supposed to do? Tell them to move out? In theory this needed to be provided prior to moving in. But as things like this go of course you give leeway and try not to be a hard ass. I am sure I will get the cert but there is liability for a brief time prior to receiving it. My point is all of this is real life and the difference between what is taught in school (or online) and what actually happens in business. [1]
[1] And another tenant provided the CERT but named me personally instead of the LLC. And I've had cases where my own insurance company mixes up company names (there are several) on the policy and it's a constant battle to get all paperwork actually straight and in order (easy when you own 1 thing, much more difficult to keep track of when you own several or have multiple tenants).
Back in the early to mid 90's the root DNS servers were also left in unlocked rooms of some Universities according to stories that I read around that time.
Also for .info domains when they first came out I happen to be at the headquarters of the registry (Afilias when it was in the US) and they had their servers sitting out in the middle of an office that was quite unprotected like you would any tower computer. The janitor could have taken it off line with a vacuum cleaner. (This was early 2000's iirc.)
"What is the actual risk here, how many people have been bitten by this sort of thing and what was the resulting damage?"
Exactly. And what I essentially typically say is "the scope of the problem has not been defined".
We see this often on news reports on TV as an example. They go off with hyperbole about some issue but fail to address exactly how many people have been effected by it. Simply saying things like "there is a growing concern..." or cherry picking examples.
We see this now with cases of "police brutality" and use of unwarranted force. It's not that it doesn't exist, but that any reports totally ignore how often it actually happens vs. how many times it doesn't happen.
I posted this and wanted to put the word "flawed" before "poll". Mainly because this got front page mention on the WSJ website but if you read how the poll was done it's clearly suspect in it's methodology.
What independent indicators would there be if the majority of national polls had margins of error so far underestimated as to be meaningless? Particularly this far into the future from an election which would provide some assessment of accuracy. Or, put a different way, what published assurances exist that a particular poll has resulted from a properly random sampling of the voting populace? (often: the cell-phone screening problem) At the very least there's a bias to judging a poll as having some accuracy because of the "weather prediction paradox", which is: I say I can predict the weather 23 days from now with perfect accuracy because I can change and refine my prediction as that day approaches and say I was 100% correct in my prediction 22 days ago given my data then as now conditions (or voters' minds) have changed.
I completely agree. I find the sliders to be frustrating and detract from the experience of taking in the changes in their entirety. We aren't doing a pixel by pixel comparison so the UI shouldn't treat it that way.
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).