Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

I think it goes without saying that there is nothing remotely legitimate happening here. The fact that Aaron posted this comment and expected anybody to believe it is remarkable.

That being said, I spent 5 minutes researching Aaron Cheung and I was astonished by what I found. He has a Twitter account, but has posted exactly 0 times [1]. He has an HN account, but has posted exactly 0 times [2], and only commented twice (including today). He graduated from MIT in 2009 and this has seemingly been the only real job he's had for the past 5 years [3].

I think, from this perspective, I understand why Aaron is doing what he's doing. It doesn't make it right, not even close, but this person has lived and breathed the home cleaning space for his entire professional career. He may not have the slightest idea what else he could possibly do instead.

    [1]: https://twitter.com/aarontcheung
    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aarontcheung
    [3]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarontcheung

Edit: I'm certainly not claiming that people who are inactive on social media are bad people. But given the complete picture of what has been reported in the media, what was revealed today and the tone-deafness of his comment, I personally think this lack of engagement is part of the explanation.

> He graduated from MIT in 2009 ... he may not have the slightest idea what else he could possibly do instead.

There's endless ways we could speculate about why he's doing what he's doing, but is being six years out of school one of them?

He spent "his entire professional career" (5 years!!!) in home cleaning. And before that it looks like he spent four years at MIT majoring in chemical engineering.

Something that smells bad to me: Homejoy was facing multiple lawsuits at the time they shut down (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/17/cleaning-st...). Is this some kind of end-run around that?

I don't think it's fair to judge people based on a lack of social media presence. Plenty of successful, competent, qualified people don't tweet.

Just, thank you.

Hear, hear!

I don't have an active social media presence attached to my real name because I like my privacy. To imply that makes me lacking, is simply ignorant.

Can you explain what exactly "astonished" you about the results of your 5 minute research project?

No offence, but don't become a detective, and decline any jury service. A lot of people use pseudonyms.

There's a multitude of good reasons why this poster didn't want to use his real name. In all honestly, if I was hiring, or deciding to do business with an individual, if they used their real name, and had a plethora of comments on Twitter; I don't think I would hire, nor trust that individual with information.

(To the HN community. Does HN offer a way to delete comments? I just assumed they did? Maybe they don't? I do know I can delete briefly after I make a comment, but that privilege dies pretty quick. Why?)

That was my first thought. Company facing impending doom? Do a runner with the assets, wait for the dust to settle, and try again with a different name and logo.

But that's something the CEO did instead. In many ways, Adora represented the Homejoy brand, and if people saw other founders they wouldn't get as much attention. It made sense for them to have one person be the voice.

Not everyone that's a founder has to be in front of people (literally or virtually).

I don't think his comment was "tone deaf" as much as it was trying to change the tone of the conversation.

It looks to me as though Homejoy & Fly Maids have done a terrible job of communicating this, but it seems legitimate to me. When companies get acquired, customers have always come along for the ride. In fact, that's often the main thing that companies get acquired for. Facebook could've built a Whatsapp clone, but the billions of dollars of value was the user base. In this case, it's a bit less usual since just the customer data has been acquired.

And some people who do use social media disappear for legitimate reasons.

And someone else's website design.

What does it matter whether he twittered or hacker newsered? What a weird thing to bring up.

More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467925 and marked it off-topic.

>More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site.

I agree with your point that they are weird things to bring up, but how is that "stalking"? It's looking at 3 very public profile pages, which requires almost no effort to look at. Unless you've edited the post to remove information, that seems entirely benign. There's absolutely 0 expectation of privacy with those pages, and almost by definition were created to allow access for the general public to that information.

I meant it metaphorically, but yes I'm sure there are better ways of putting it.

Sure, it's public data, but so are lots of things. When you search them out and compile them, you create something different than the scattered pieces. To do that and use it to attack somebody, or insinuate about them personally, crosses a line we shouldn't cross here.

I suspect crabasa meant no harm, was just being curious and participating in the discussion, but in these cases the group dynamic tends quickly to get a lot uglier than the sum of our individual motives.