Opening with "Rocketr is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management" - this is an entirely useless fluff sentence, tells nobody anything, doesn't provide a useful frame of reference for what's coming next... I feel like the story here is that Mr. Peek needed a harsher critic when he was practicing. It's surprising how rarely we encounter good critics in our lives, everybody is focused on supporting and validating and has little practice at really challenging, reviewing, evaluating.

I don't really see a problem with PG driving, I see a problem with not being ready to clearly and concisely differentiate. How is it different from Evernote and how is it different from Wikipedia should be completely anticipated ready-to-handle followups with great one-sentence answers that focus on the customers.

I really don't like the alternate suggested approach because I'm not willing to grant the premise. Does work get done using team based tools? Work gets done to a shocking degree with email, excel, individual text editors, powerpoint... none of which are really 'team based'. My first thought is to go with something like "We help individuals collaborate by [whatever it is this thing does]" simply because that gets me a frame of reference faster and gets to talking about the interesting part sooner. But I'm still not sure what the interesting part is... so far this sounds more like Google Wave than anything else, and that alone might be enough to pass on backing the idea, under the "will fail because it's too hard to convince people they need this" category.

Ouch, sorry, I thought it was the right thing to do, on the balance. Like you said, it's a really morally gray decision, either way, but I think it's actually worse to do nothing.

Be careful reading these comments. There's an overwhelming bias on HN in favor of "rules that impede startups are there to be broken", and, of course, 3/4 of the site is going to cheer you on. Remember when Mark Pincus said early stage startups need (as I remember) to lie, cheat, and steal to get off the ground? HN cheered that on too.

Just remember that every nerd that has ever broken any rule --- from seeding a torrent of a movie to scraping a competing site to (yes, go look it up) exploit SQL injection to dump a company's mail spool to the Internet --- has come up with a personally compelling rationale to do it. MAFIAA, "we're helping apartment hunters", "STRATFOR was an evil intelligence company". These are all of a kind.

The fact is, you compete with Craigslist. However much "better" your service is, customers don't agree: they overwhelmingly prefer Craigslist, because that's where the market is: the "killer feature" in your space is the market.

So, to stay viable in the face of competition that has you beaten dead to rights, you've rationalized cheating them.

I don't find what you're doing detestable, or anything like that, but it sure is annoying to watch you pat yourself on the back for it. I'm with Phillip. Have you read a lot of his comments? I have. He's not dumb, nor is he a troll.

Google seems to be getting all of the credit, yet the device's manufacturer, Asus, has consistently made the best Android tablets all along.

The Transformer tablets have all enjoyed an excellent build quality, great design aesthetics, and cutting edge hardware. They aren't perfect, but what tablet is?

Dude, I have no doubt your service IS way more useful than craiglist. I look forward to using it when I next move.

Just… don't dance around your motivations here. You want to build a better service, and you need CL's data for that. CL doesn't want you to use their data. You said that's too bad.

That's all there is to say.

"Little-known social coding start-up".

Got to love the WSJ.

Pulling from an old blog post, I don't see any inconsistency.

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...

> The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.

I saw the 'apple.com' domain and almost jumped out of my seat. I thought it was something official from Apple.