Assuming that user is even right about this, I would call that the most extreme imaginable version of trying to buy off publishers with a cut of the lost revenue. That's #3 on my list of scammy Brave practices.
I'd say the author is being generous to the agency and Isaac.
There is easily a version of this where the agency has landed on an excellent strategy for milking 7K for 6x their spend.
At best (generously assuming the agency's retro is all true) the CEO, Isaac has been greedy or naive in taking on work they clearly weren't set up to deliver.
Who knows if this is true, or what the full story is, but in general I think this kind of tactic is poisonous to a company. Please read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629201 (I just re-read that. Such an excellent post.)
> Firstly, I know what you’re thinking, this sounds outrageous,
> it’s not at all realistic. Well, sorry to break it to you, but
> this is what MOST of our deals look like. Yes, MOST.
Is this actually an investor who invests in deals? The domain is hidden behind a Florida privacy service and there's no name(s) attached to the book that's being peddled. Even the PayPal checkout shows only "TPE" as the seller.
> The Authors have invested Millions at top Private Equity firms!
Okay, but who are they? What firms? The post appears to be just teasers for getting you to buy the PDF. Even the PDF only has recommendations from anonymous positions at anonymous companies. If they really are VCs they should give the PDF away for free and get their name out there as the honest VCs. However, that goes counter to their assertion that "MOST" of their own dealings use the very trickery that they claim to expose.
I agree. This is pretty horrible and I’m surprised to see the sentiment is as good as it apparently is. This is just bragging about how to create a 100% parasitic middleman venture that contributes absolutely no value to anything. One might suspect there is more behind this posting and comments
It implies it, but doesn’t guarantee it. Everyone wants to be that hero in the narrative, and by the time the people figure out they have been shirked (but not directly lied to) your company has been acquired and you’re out with bags of money.
Clever, unethical and legal (by the thinnest margin)
This is actually what I started thinking when I got to the end of the article. Maybe just immediate human snatch and grab cynicism.
That the author hired somebody to dump review, does something fishy with money like those above noted, and then sues for more money.
Levine over at Bloomberg had an interesting article where ransomware gangs are now filing SEC reports, as a way to pressure companies to pay, or minimize ROI.
> Zoom Video execs made millions of dollars by dumping company stock during its recent price rallies.
Indeed, this sounds like clueless click bait. Anyone paying attention would think that the price of Zoom stock is headed up, not down. It's far from clear that they made "millions", or even any money at all.
And in either case "dumping" isn't unethical unless the dumper is acting on inside information, etc.
It was an interesting article until near the end when the author dropped that he was angry because this other company wasn't paying him referral fees they promised in exchange for his good reviews of their product, which from some of the discussion here sounds like there is a consensus is bad products. This suggests that the reviewer was writing false reviews because doing so earned him money, and recasts the rest of the article into the category of "two con artists trying to out con each other".
Thank you. He wrote a blog post about turning down a profitable offer in order to keep his semi-profitable current scheme as well as choices he made on how to represent himself.
We are reading about this here on hacker news because he's being promoted here to compensate for that lost money.
That's wonderful. Whoever posted this, thanks for wasting my time. If it was the author, you truly need to get a degree in management because you're adept at wasting technical people's time.
Damn, this is one of the more disappointing things I’ve read on HN. Everyone is just trying to exploit the system for a dollar, I get it that’s capitalism. It’s just kind of saddening to me, it’s like the social media infection spreading. Where you can’t really trust what you read because you have a fake author, hiring a maybe expert to write a book. Hell, that ghost writer may have developed a good algorithm for pulling together information for that book, or just copying and pasting from places. I guess I just have issues with the do whatever I can to earn a buck thing.
Agreed. There's obviously trolling for karma going on, but then again, there's the other side of it, namely, the author trying to use the reddit post as leverage when trying to sort things out with paypal.
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