
Nonbelievers. - pius
http://toohardtopronounce.com/2008/2/13/non-believers
======
h34t
* Interesting idea, to save your best oration until after the first rejection. Does anyone here do this? I can't see it working in most circumstances, but in a boardroom setting where your audience has paid good money for the work you've already done, they're not likely to actually let you leave after 5 minutes regardless of your threats (it was quite a dramatic bluff, I'd say).

* His standing up was interesting, but I wouldn't respect it if I were his audience. You can put all your cards on the table with less drama. To me, he was too overtly aggressive & theatrical. It unnecessarily puts the rest of the room on the defensive.

*Did anyone else not find the quality of discussion low? Poor logic and superficial, emotional responses. Reminds me why I stopped watching (almost all) television.

~~~
pius
_Interesting idea, to save your best oration until after the first rejection.
Does anyone here do this?_

When I was involved in student government in college I successfully pulled off
a stunt similar to this against an obdurate administration. A group of deans
had started a process by which they were going to take some public, widely
opposed actions that would be deleterious to campus life. They had started a
series of negotiations with the heads of some major student organizations,
plus me (as president of the student body), ostensibly to come to a mediated
response with all of the stakeholders.

At the penultimate meeting, our student coalition came to the administration
with a reasonable, but amended version of the plan that we were willing to
accept. They thanked us profusely and told us and the student newspaper that
they were reviewing the proposal and integrating it into their plan.

At the last meeting, they presented us with the "final plan" they were going
to execute. It turned out that they had incorporated none of our changes; the
series of meetings had been an elaborate kabuki designed for the illusion of
"listening to the students."

I'd prepared the other students for what we'd do if this turned out to be the
case. At the meeting, I told the deans that it was clear that they had no real
interest in incorporating student opinions and that for them to
unapologetically discard our changes meant that the whole thing was a farce.
If they wanted to execute their plan while systematically disregarding student
input, that's wholly their prerogative, but we have no interest in helping
them with the appearance of gathering student input. If and when they were
actually interested in student input, we'd love to help them but until then
there was no sense wasting time with meetings. Every one of the student
leaders got up and left the room as we'd done in contingency planning.

The deans caved 36 hours later.

 _Did anyone else not find the quality of discussion low? Poor logic and
superficial, emotional responses. Reminds me why I stopped watching (almost
all) television._

I think your analysis is superficial, actually. The show is quite nuanced.
This was a snippet, depicting one of the characters trying to sell a lipstick
ad; I don't think anything in the scene is enough for someone to conclude that
the show is plagued by poor logic.

~~~
h34t
Interesting scenario with student government. Remarkably similar to the
content of the video, too.

I didn't find poor logic in the show per se, but in the discussion within the
show -- the thinking of the participants of the meeting. The show may have
done a very nuanced job of capturing that boardroom discussion true to reality
and in a way that appeals to the audience... my issue with is the quality of
that discussion itself, the quality of the reasoning of the participants.

------
daniel-cussen
What would happen if a VC sent you a term sheet, you had good alternatives,
and sent them back a term sheet with a whole lot of changes marked out in red
(say, no board seats, no preferred stock, no outside CEO, shorter vesting
period, etc)?

------
iamwil
So I'm interested in everyone else's response at the end. Would you have sat
down? What would be your response to the second command to sit?

~~~
pg
I didn't even obey the command to install Flash 9.

~~~
ivankirigin
You don't like flash?

~~~
pg
No, I just didn't have Flash 9 installed on the machine I was using.

Some of the startups choosing between Javascript and Flash say that this is
one of the problems with Flash. If you choose any recent version, some
fraction of people won't have it installed, and faced with the interruption of
installing it, will just click on Back instead.

~~~
dfranke
and some fraction, like me, won't have any version installed.

~~~
emfle
Some fraction will also not have JavaScript enabled. That was very popular
among nerds back when JavaScript wasn't essential to web browsing.

Fortunately, that particular brand of nerd can safely be ignored. They are a
tiny, tiny minority who make a lot of noise on websites such as this.

~~~
pg
Tiny but influential. So I don't think they can always be that safely ignored,
especially for startups that hope to begin with techy early adopters.

