"The two men signed a deal with Y Combinator in which they paid $6.5 million to gain first access to roughly 40 promising entrepreneurs selected by the elite incubator. "
This is completely false. We didn't sign any deal with Ron and Yuri. They simply offered 150k apiece to all the startups in the winter 2011 batch. Anyone else could have done the same thing.
Reporters often get the facts wrong, but this is one of the more extreme examples I've seen.
"But a few months later, Mr. Conway ignited another drama when he quietly negotiated what some investors considered to be a sweetheart deal."
You should write to the WSJ that anyone that wants the same "sweetheart deal" can easily get it, by simply emailing the same offer to all the Y-combinator startups and putting up the cash. I think these guys are just way too used to Wall Street, where everything is closed doors negotiations, $800/hr attorneys and secret deals. They just assumed that some type of sweetheart deal must have been involved.
Comments
"The two men signed a deal with Y Combinator in which they paid $6.5 million to gain first access to roughly 40 promising entrepreneurs selected by the elite incubator. "
This is completely false. We didn't sign any deal with Ron and Yuri. They simply offered 150k apiece to all the startups in the winter 2011 batch. Anyone else could have done the same thing.
Reporters often get the facts wrong, but this is one of the more extreme examples I've seen.
And lets not forget the previous sentence:
"But a few months later, Mr. Conway ignited another drama when he quietly negotiated what some investors considered to be a sweetheart deal."
You should write to the WSJ that anyone that wants the same "sweetheart deal" can easily get it, by simply emailing the same offer to all the Y-combinator startups and putting up the cash. I think these guys are just way too used to Wall Street, where everything is closed doors negotiations, $800/hr attorneys and secret deals. They just assumed that some type of sweetheart deal must have been involved.
Kind of makes me wonder if similar reporting styles played a large part in the late 90s boom/collapse.
Good point: the article's style reeks of artificial scarcity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity