Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.

Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?

Also:

> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.

"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?

I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.

You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1]. You've also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.

You've clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.

But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can't believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in "bad faith"....

And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I'm sorry. But sadly there aren't very many other options.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...

This can undoubtedly be spun as “HN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussion” but the alternative take is just as valid. It’s not bad faith feedback, it’s HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual

Say if someone claims you stole their car (and the alternative could be that you borrowed it with someone else's permission, and they had no idea, so they felt it was stolen), would you reply with "I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who feels I stole their car", or would you first say "I never stole any car, please reach out to me if you know of any such incidents"? Wouldn't it be incredibly bizarre to ask them for a discussion session without first rejecting the premise?!

Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.

With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.

I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.

What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.

So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.

And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. That should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.

We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. Occasionally I use it if a thread is mostly aflame about some controversy and some commenter points out how the whole thing is inaccurate. We don't use it to systematically privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users—that wouldn't be in the spirit of the site guidelines at all, and we take those pretty seriously.

> We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. We don't use it to privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users.

Do you have the denominator (with root-level comments) for the 41 top comments by any chance?

Thanks for the edit with added context. Any chance of an indicator that a comment is pinned so that people can transparently see when this is done? It's predictable that your moderation comments would be pinned, but even pinning a founder's comment to apparently contextualize a potentially misleading headline adds substantial mass to the claim that certain moderation actions might be done for the benefit of the company or companies involved in the thread.

Framed another way: if PC's context for the article was relevant, it would've achieved critical mass on its own. Helping it with a pin could be perceived as moving the needle for gain.

A simple "pin" icon (or emoji, or however you feel is best) may not resolve whether this is a "proper" use of moderation tools, but it will at least make it transparent when it happens, which adds credibility to the HN platform.

> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.

Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.

This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, must) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.

> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.

This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should not have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.

P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.

I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.

At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.

So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.

I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"

*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.

As such, you rebutting with "I never ghosted you" would not be equivalent in any shape or form to "I reply to every single email in your inbox" (or whatever) for you to feel you might somehow be accidentally telling a falsehood if you happened to miss some email in your inbox. "I never ghosted you" in this context would be a direct rejection of the purported intent—i.e. the accusation you were purposefully ignoring someone's emails because you were actually trying to fish information out of them—because, absent the intent, that accusation wouldn't have been made to begin with. You can make the lack of intent explicit if you want, definitely, but it's already implicit in the accusation, and so would be in implied in the rejection of that accusation.

We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, “mine them for information”, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior. (And we’ve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I don’t know.

How is it reneging on a term sheet if they wire the money? That's fulfilling the terms of the term sheet (despite the fact that term sheets aren't binding), no?

Frankly, I'd love if someone were to extricate their accusation as you did, making it easier for me to parse the different actions and intentions. I really liked how you phrased it: "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us." I feel more confident in rebutting different parts of that—e.g., "I saw the emails and deliberately did not reply to them but not because we were pretending to acquire you, but actually we were in a legal process where we couldn't share more at the time" or something like that.

Sometimes if someone accuses me of something, I'll even try to ask for clarification on what they mean by ghosted, or I'll rephrase it as you did, to try to gain more clarity. Maybe it should be obvious to people what ghosted and fishing means, but I find clarifying can at least help me and the other person know if we agree what the definition is and what we both think happened.

*edit: @dataflow, I really appreciate you going back and forth with me on this. I think I learned a lot, about how I try to pull out the intention from the action, and how others may see intention and action intertwined. I'm gonna let my brain digest this as I sleep, if you want to continue, I'd be glad to pick it up in the morning :-) Thank you!

*edit2: ohhh and for helping me get better at using the edit feature and not creating parallel threads, I'm not sure if what I'm doing now is more helpful, but I at least believe I'm being more helpful :-D

However, I imagine Stripe has interacted with many many companies regarding these things, but maybe not.

I think I've just been in too many conflicts where the other person thinks I intentionally hurt them and I didn't see it that way, or conversely, I think I did something to hurt someone, apologize, and they are confused because they didn't feel hurt at all.

Also, we I like to always keep in mind that sometimes resentment dominates the desire to share a certain story, and without knowing anything about the transaction referred above, I'd say it's quite clear that temp7536 has at least some resentment or envy over Stripe's success.

Final thought (not referring to Stripe nor Sequoia in particular): yes, most companies, and most VCs, are sharks. I was recently reminded of that twice, and probably lost large sums of money in the process (again: nothing to do with Stripe nor with Sequoia). I think it's a rule that have always applied to life, in general, and it won't stop being applied just because we have the internet.

I simply hope that things like the Panama Papers, Wikileaks, and such, will eventually bring more financial transparency to the world, and make it harder for these sharks to keep feasting on their prey.

The point is that your reply would need to address the lack of ill intent no matter how you word it. I find "I never ghosted you" and "I never intended to ghost you" both adequate, and you can disagree on either of them, but that's not the point. The point is "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

Edit: Sleep well!

Thanks for digging into it; you didn't have to.

Because the accusation was more specific than "I felt taken advantage of" it was they engage engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

I hope he means me.

That would be theatre - they can then add a new secret-pinning feature, afaik HN code is not open anyway.

Trust is hard to achieve and very easy to lose.

> The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior

If you're in a position of power (and money), people will return your calls, regardless of rumors. This is true in all fields, from recruiting to publishing to VC deals, etc.

This is also a line of defense used by serial abusers who always (always!) claim that because they have had successful consensual relationships, there can't be cases where they abused the other party.

> over our decade of operation

Also weak. "We've done so many things. Seen so many people. It's been a long time. I don't recall. Things were different back then."

- - -

That said -- weak defense is just that -- it doesn't mean offense.

Same SV story, different decade.

That allows you to get in first on an awful amount of threads.

The reality is some acquisitions are opportunistic, some are strategic, and even the opportunistic ones often have a strategic element. For a strategic acquisition, if it doesn't go ahead (comes down to ROI isn't perceived as being as good as potential alternatives), the almost inevitable outcome will often be (i) a different acquisition is eventually made, or (ii) the acquiring company decides to make an investment in that area themselves.

One of the ways to avoid getting "screwed over" as an acquiree is to ensure you've done the work beforehand to maximise the chances of compatibility with the acquirer: things like compliance, data protection, having a poor grasp of your numbers and financials, and other mundane matters (or combinations of them) can easily trip up the process.

When an acquisition does fall through for almost any reason it's pretty natural for the potential acquirees to feel rather bruised by the process: they've wasted their time, they've been screwed over, etc. Often that won't be the case although, I've no doubt, there are instances where it will be.

(Btw, in case it's not obvious, I know nothing about the activities of Stripe or its founders, good or bad.)

> engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

Going back to the dating analogy, if I go on 5 dates with someone and then we don't go on any more dates, that person may assume I had no intention to pursue a long-term relationship with them and was just using them, maybe for sex or company or whatever. However, perhaps I was trying to determine whether I could make a long-term relationship work—maybe I initially didn't think it would work but only went on the next 4 dates because I really really wanted it to work.

All I'm saying is that people can glean different intentions from the same action and it can be really hard to know whether our actions have caused pain to people.

> that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Again, the tricky part is Stripe may _think_ they have cheated in one case but in that case, the other person may not have even seen it as cheating. Eg, maybe I'm in an exclusive relationship with someone and my ex comes into town and we get lunch. I feel tremendously guilty for doing it and confess and apologize to my current partner. And the my current partner looks confused and laughs saying they're grateful I went to hang out with my ex. A different partner could split the relationship with me immediately and say I'm evil for having that lunch.

To one side it may seem _obvious_ that a transgression was committed and to the other side, it may be _oblivious_.

Your comment about Finix seems deliberately crafted to convey you did not speak with Sequoia but at the same time not denying that you spoke (made decision without suggestions).

So to clarify, are you saying that Stripe did not speak with Sequoia about Finix?

Or that Sequoia "made their own decision", while they have spoken with Stripe about Finix?

I agree he didn't directly refute the ill intent on the ghosting/mining accusations, yet, I think he tried to cover some of them in the following:

> (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)

> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before? What if no one had previously told him, "I think you ghosted me and I think you were mining me for info and pretending to acquire my company"?

Or in other words... he didn't. Roundaboutness is literally how PR departments spin things to look like the exact opposite of the truth. "I don't think some of your claims are true" is not something that defends you when there are very strong, pointed accusations against you.

>> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate.

> But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before?

So? The reply would be inadequate just the same. I'm not saying he can't say that, I'm saying he can't say that and then leave it at that.

Btw I'm honestly tired of this back-and-forth at this point, so this'll be my last reply, sorry about that.

https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...

https://johnmccrea.medium.com/why-the-billion-dollar-code-is...