I submitted because it's a hilariously awful story of the scamming that goes on in the startup scene. I have a few friends who've shared similar stories (CEOs lying about funding, office leasers not being paid, etc), but this one takes the cake for absurdity. The HN people tracked down the real company behind the story, and the CTO / co-founder at least had seemingly decent history of work. But otherwise red flag 6 and on-wards would make me start researching flights back home. Up to that point, I could see someone who was inexperienced or naive falling prey, thinking that was just the crazy world of startups. "hire fast and fire fast" isn't too far from "move fast and break things" in the list of SV-insane-utterances. Then again, I would have turned the other direction at "* with machine learning / NLP". With any luck, that CEO won't get any more money after a testimonial like this. Or maybe they'll go to jail for fraud. Also, the author wasn't kidding about the spongebob facebook memes....and it goes on and on and on. I may go back and read this later but this seems a lot like the whiny rant of the one person stupid enough to take the job after the smart people ran screaming.
And I shared it for the same reason. It's like the Dan Lyons book but with substantially more facepalm. The platform will be built to scale to 100M's of candidates and 100M's of postings. The system will initially provide unsupervisored matching at which point the candidate (or posting) can start to tailor the results with likes and dislikes at which point we will use supervisored algorithms. So... "machine headhunting." Apparently they're unaware LinkedIn already does that.1 For 1 is an innovative new company building out a robust text analytics platform for actively matching job candidates with job postings. We are using entity extraction, natural language processing and machine learning to provide the matching.
Also, they're doubling down. While it is not our policy to discuss personnel matters, we want to make it clear that this former employee was fired for cause. Signed affidavits from current employees attest to this former employee’s failure to perform her required duties in the workplace. In addition, they attest to her participation in an attempt to undermine or oust certain members of management. This former employee demanded a sum of $50,000 upon her departure. Under no verbal agreement, contract or any other type of covenant was this person entitled to such a sum. After learning that WrkRiot would not pay what it considered extortion money, this former employee began her campaign of slanderous of activity over the Internet. WrkRiot believes this former employee’s writings have led to dangerous situations for many of our employees through the leaking of personal information and through threats being made over social media from others who have taken the former employee’s misinformation as truth. We regret having to spend time and effort on this when there is so much to do in the development of our unique application. However, we want to make it abundantly clear that the slanderous writings of a disgruntled former employee do not represent the truth about WrkRiot, its management or workforce. The racist, sexist and abusive comments our employees have received are inexcusable. Further, we want to make it clear that we will seek any and all legal remedies to end this campaign of slander.WrkRiot is considering legal action against a disgruntled former employee who has launched a slanderous campaign against WrkRiot and some of its employees via social media.