
Unmasking Startup L. Jackson - jackgavigan
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/unmasking-startup-l-jackson-silicon-valley-s-favorite-twitter-persona
======
raphman_
Previous unmasking (without naming him) based on screenshots from his account:

[https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a)

~~~
vermontdevil
So was he right?

~~~
joshdickson
Yeah, I'm surprised by how many people still ask me this. There's proof in the
piece, but I also write long so I don't blame you if you missed it :)

~~~
dipnuggetron
Your blog post which I assume is connected to aproduct would have gotten a lot
more traction is you had actually outed him.

~~~
joshdickson
It might have, but I don't think it would have been the right type of
attention. I think outing would have been wrong, and even if I didn't feel
that way, I think a lot of tech folks would have really come down hard on me
in the future. The tech world is amazingly small and insular in my experience,
and as someone trying to break into that world, the last thing you want to do
is give everyone a reason to never take your call.

I somewhat regret the appearance of a conflict of interest on my part there
(that would not have been present if I had put it on Medium, for instance),
because it really did look like a growth hack on my part, and I can't stand
when people do things like this _for traffic._ It was certainly nice to see
the traffic, but that's not why I did it.

Syrah - the site that it's on - was sort of an engineering proof of concept
for me. I wanted to design something a little like Medium so I could better
understand what was involved, and that's what it is. It was a pretty major
effort to do it all on my own and I definitely learned a lot. I wanted to take
that experience and use it for another, much larger project, where we built a
CMS that could power websites, apps, etc, and let people white label it for
their own use (sorta think Wordpress, but for more than just websites).
Ultimately YC didn't take us and I ended up falling into another project that
I'm working on now. I'd love to revisit someday, but for now, I just use Syrah
to write things because I put so much time and love into it. Sometimes they
are large (I broke a lot of the Tango issues:
[https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/565f62f40eaac8b79f519b17](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/565f62f40eaac8b79f519b17)),
sometimes they are not
([https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/56aead844b23e3498c0392a1](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/56aead844b23e3498c0392a1)).

~~~
dipnuggetron
Nice to see someone with ethics though.

------
cm3
Why? I mean why is it important to identify who's behind something that
doesn't hurt anybody? Can't we just enjoy the art?

~~~
lquist
A fair question :/

Unfortunately your answer is this thread itself. As I am writing this comment
it is Link #1 on HN. That is to say that people love this kind of content and
it drives pageviews, so media outlets are incentivized to write about it. We
have only ourselves to blame :/

------
vram22
I've found @DEVOPS_BORAT to be funny too. Kept seeing his tweets for over a
year or two; humorous ones about devops, from an imaginary Armenian devops guy
with broken English. Seems to have stopped tweeting a while ago.

~~~
smcl
When it comes to devops on twitter I've found @fart's stuff to be pretty
great. Particularly this: [https://medium.com/weird/why-i-am-the-most-
important-devops-...](https://medium.com/weird/why-i-am-the-most-important-
devops-thought-leader-46a191ac0f42) \- a little sample below:

"This data is encapsulated in what are called “Data Beans” which are stored on
the hard drive as zeroes (Optimal bean or “prime bean”) and ones (Flatbean or
“bad bean”). These Data Beans are stored magnetically and retrieved as
necessary. If a user requests too much data at one time they can suffer from
data poisoning.

The computer’s RAM also stores Data Beans in the cloud. No one knows how this
is done or why "

~~~
curiousgeorgio
Also, @fart (aka Jon Hendren) pulled off one of the best examples of trolling
the media I've ever seen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WqCj_3U0Lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WqCj_3U0Lc)

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Isn't he the dude that trolled himself with the 'Smashmouth eat the eggs'
thing and the consequences thereof.

~~~
smcl
That may have been @arr - David Thorpe (edit: you were right actually)

~~~
NamTaf
Both of them are/were contributors to Something Awful's frontpage media

David's also really talented at trolling (though in this instance, the show
was in on the joke):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdUHDDj7fhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdUHDDj7fhk)

------
flashman
My top five contenders for the author were:

@davemcclure - Dave McClure

@pt - Parker Thompson

@tylerschultz - Tyler Schultz

@supernate - Nate Clark

@dsboulder

I could never narrow it down to one of them. I had a simple theory: in the
beginning, Startup L. Jackson's Twitter followers had a higher probability of
following the real author's account, and they would have probably followed the
author before Startup L. Jackson.

All I had to do was get the list of people following SLJ (which Twitter
provides in reverse chronological order), then find who those people followed
before SLJ. The people above were followed by at least six of SLJ's first 500
followers, making them prime contenders, but as I said, I never found a
smoking gun for any of them.

~~~
joshdickson
This was one of the weaknesses that was fixed. You might have noticed that at
the time of my post, if you had pulled this list again, @pt ceased following
@StartupLJackson.

~~~
flashman
That shouldn't have mattered much - I assumed the author's real account
wouldn't follow their parody to avoid giving clues.

What I expected to find was that, if I looked at who SLJ's first 100 followers
followed, I'd find some accounts they disproportionately followed prior to
following SLJ. And I did find that - the people followed by the first 100
(prior to SLJ) pointed to a Pivotal connection. Because many of them were
following @pt, it wouldn't have made much difference if @pt didn't follow SLJ.

I'm going to try @devops_borat now...

~~~
joshdickson
Ah, I misread what you were saying. You're right, that really makes it hard to
narrow down. You should have tried cold emailing them all at the same time to
see if anyone replied positively!

------
circuit_breaker
@PHP_CEO is one of the funniest Twitter accounts I've seen.. example: "IT HAS
COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT SOMEONE CALLED JASON HAS BEEN ENCODING AND DECODING
DATA IN OUR APP. PLEASE CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS"

~~~
inopinatus
Do parody accounts now form the most diverting Twitter content? It ain't an
endorsement of the medium.

 _addendum: fair enough; make that "parody | satire"._

~~~
Analemma_
While PHP_CEO might be distracting entertainment, some of the best accounts,
including the ones mentioned on this thread (@StartupLJackson,
@SwiftOnSecurity, @internetofshit, etc.) are not parody but satire, which is
definitely a worthy use of the medium.

------
tosseraccount
[https://twitter.com/startupljackson](https://twitter.com/startupljackson) is
the twitter site.

We need a list of sometimes anonymous, poignant and politically incorrect
twitter feeds for other industries.

For Finance, check out
[https://twitter.com/ReformedBroker](https://twitter.com/ReformedBroker)
("Downtown" Josh Brown) and "gselevator"
[https://twitter.com/GSElevator](https://twitter.com/GSElevator)) (author was
also eventually unmasked)

"Teach the coal miners and frackers Python and Ruby."

classic.

~~~
kelukelugames
Why do you think SLJ was politically incorrect? He never said anything rude or
ignorant.

He often tweeted about diversity and inclusion and coined the term "culture
debt" for startups.

update: okay I think the words pc and un un pc have become meaningless because
they mean too many different things.

~~~
potatolicious
I think OP was using "politically incorrect" in its original definition -
i.e., speaking in a way counter to what's politically popular/accepted by the
elite.

Which in Startup L. Jackson's case was definitely true - he called out a lot
of the Valley's cultural myopia, excesses, and failures in a way that he would
have been unable to do without the pseudonymity or pretense of satire.

Unfortunately the word has also been co-opted by some to mean "liberal" or
"progressive", which is a shame.

~~~
cronjobber
Wikipedia: _In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase "politically correct"
was associated with the dogmatic application of Stalinist doctrine [...] In
the 1970s, the New Left began using the term "politically correct."_

~~~
PhasmaFelis
_Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz
said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and
progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard
against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."_

Everybody always misses that part.

------
grandalf
What always impressed me was the quality of the humor, like a young Chris Rock
unafraid and insightful.

------
josh_carterPDX
You know the startup community has an ego problem when Bloomberg does an
entire puff piece about an anonymous twitter satire profile who happened to be
___gasp_ __a VC.

------
CM30
Have to be honest, I'm surprised how little effort it took to 'unmask' him.
Usually when people try and find out the actual identities of anonymous
internet celebrities, it becomes a sort of investigation where they have to
put all the pieces together.

But that doesn't seem to be the case here, unless the story is missing a few
steps.

~~~
joshdickson
The story is missing a few steps.

~~~
veryluckyxyz
We would really love if you published the piece, an extended version with all
the gory details perhaps, that you wanted to but did not! Pretty please with 2
cherries on top!

------
fowkswe
I was always a big fan of
[https://twitter.com/hipsterhacker](https://twitter.com/hipsterhacker)

He's for the most part inactive, but occasionally drips out something
acerbically relevant.

~~~
an4rchy
Wow.. this guy with 93 tweets has 53k followers... that feels like its the
highest followers/tweet I've ever seen. f/t (gotta trademark this)

~~~
billbail
Highest ratio I've ever seen is from Sean Lock with 2 tweets and almost 95k
followers.

[https://twitter.com/theseanlock?lang=en](https://twitter.com/theseanlock?lang=en)

------
ChuckMcM
I miss @devops_borat, I don't recall if that person was ever outed but some of
his one liners really nailed it.

------
noer
As far as parody/satire accounts go, I'm a huge fan of @BoredElonMusk. I
hadn't even noticed that there haven't been tweets from Startup L. Jackson in
months...

------
noir_lord
I quite like @shit_hn_says

~~~
logic
See also: @Actually_HN

~~~
noir_lord
This one is still regularly updated, nice.

------
jamisteven
His advice became a hit for one reason, his handle. Far too often is the name
of something downplayed as not being important, but it is. Its catchy, a
gimmick, and people love it.

------
gohrt
So so many words to say nothing but "someone in the tech industry has a sense
of humor, was anonymous for a while"

> “But there just aren’t that many people who are in the industry who will
> respond to you if you have 500 followers, you know? They’re just like, ‘Who
> the f--- are you? Leave me alone.’ ”

Ugh, Twitter.

------
hackuser
_In Silicon Valley, a place he calls “obsessed with status and pedigree,”
could someone’s ideas get traction when it wasn’t clear if the speaker was a
state-school dropout or someone with a $100 million checkbook?_

That sounds very different than the meritocracy narrative. It would explain
why women and most minorities are so excluded.

I know the next sentence says he succeeded, but that's just one Twitter
account and doesn't represent a broader trend.

~~~
oldmanjay
Can you expand on what sounds very different? On its face your comment is
self-contradictory.

~~~
hackuser
A place "obsessed with status and pedigree" is not a meritocracy. Success
depends on status and pedigree and not on merit.

