

Loopt was a lemon, dropping to just 500 daily active users prior to sale - veguss
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/09/loopt-dau/

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sama
Well, it's been a long week and this seems an appropriately crazy way to end
it. It's off by several orders of magnitude. VentureBeat never called for the
story but I'd be happy to speak about it if they'd like to.

~~~
plasma
I hate reading attention grabbing, poorly reported articles like this (if this
is true).

It would be neat if HN attributed karma to domain names's, so that
consistently poorly reported stories begin to affect new submissions from the
same domain.

~~~
fvryan
page views first, facts later seems to be the trend :/

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brk
Perhaps it WAS a lemon, but it was still a $40MM lemon at the end of the day.

No matter how you analyze it, several startups have suffered a far worse fate.

Not sure why all the haters come out every time a sale, acquisition or
shutdown is announced.

~~~
pron
Haters? If startups are allowed to act so smug with imaginary valuations, the
"haters" are certainly allowed to gloat when those valuations are shown to be
what they are. These are the rules to this particular game.

~~~
pg
Really? I didn't know that rule.

Valuations represent investors' hopes. People's hopes for ambitious projects
are often disappointed. Is it ok to gloat whenever someone announces an
ambitious target, and doesn't hit it? Is it ok to gloat when someone enters a
marathon and fails to finish, for example? Seems to me like an asshole move.

~~~
pron
Yeah, it's an asshole move, but asshole moves are to be expected in such a
high-stakes game. If someone works really hard on a project that fails, or
doesn't do as well as he'd hoped, its definitely mean, and idiotic, to gloat.
But, if in the process he gets to gamble tens of millions of dollars of other
people's money, well, that's a different thing altogether. The project may
very well still be his passion , he may very well work just as hard - or
harder - but once he takes all that money that's a different territory.

If someone fails to finish a marathon after confidently convincing a lot of
people to place large bets on his winning, I don't know if that makes it "ok"
to gloat, but it's certainly asking for it.

To put it simply: when you run a marathon you want to be valued for your
effort; when you ask people to bet on you, you're asking to be judged on the
outcome.

A win or a loss, I understand there are some very talented, and nice, people
involved, and I hope they won't let whatever happens to them affect their self
worth, their true valuation, too much. They will still be just as talented and
just as nice even when they choose to play a high-stakes game and lose and
feel some humiliation, perhaps, when others do gloat for justified or not-so-
justified reasons. It sure does sting, but that's life. A man's (or a woman's)
true worth isn't measured by his success, and that's important to remember.
People will gloat, though.

