Since this is Hacker News let me give the most charitable reading I can to the impression I have. Most charitably, they forgot to talk more about their roadmap because they slightly fell in love with the idea of raising money. PG talks about this explicitly:
Fundraising is a chore for most founders, but some find it more interesting than working on their startup. The work at an early stage startup often consists of unglamorous schleps. Whereas fundraising, when it's going well, can be quite the opposite. Instead of sitting in your grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your software, you're being offered millions of dollars by famous investors over lunch at a nice restaurant. [26]
The danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are good at it. It's always fun to work on something you're good at. If you're one of these people, beware. Fundraising is not what will make your company successful. Listening to users complain about bugs in your software is what will make you successful. And the big danger of getting addicted to fundraising is not merely that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much money. It's that you'll start to think of yourself as being already successful, and lose your taste for the schleps you need to undertake to actually be successful. Startups can be destroyed by this.
When I see a startup with young founders that is fabulously successful at fundraising, I mentally decrease my estimate of the probability that they'll succeed. The press may be writing about them as if they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking "this is going to end badly."
"
So if this is the case, I urge this startup to talk more about its roadmap and execution, rather than (only) how much money they raised in 96 seconds. Which itself is a good achievement that we should rightfully praise.
This is a throwaway, I will be vouching for it from my main account however. It's a throwaway because finance crooks are extremely vindictive.
So, this quote:
>While we tried to make the process was fair as possible, I’d like to apologise for the frustrations over the last few days, and in particular to anyone who missed the chance to invest.
strikes me as 100% scam verbiage. As in, if, right now, I wanted to perpetrate a scam, this is the exact verbiage I would use. "as well as contacting those who missed out".
Crowdfunding rounds aren't "chances to invest" with a limited number of "slots" that you then "miss out on". They're priced securities - higher demand would just mean the security was mispriced and it needed to be priced higher. There could be a reason for this to be done, but none was offered.
The non-scammy version of this would be something like "We wanted to make a number of slots available at the valuation we selected for the current investment round of £6m. We did not want to immediately raise the valuation to people who showed interest, because we believe that startups can be hindered by too large of a valuation too soon. All that said, there is more interest at the current price than the number of shares we had to give out. We will consider whether we need to raise additional investment to execute on our roadmap just now, if we do then at what valuation, and we may contact some of the people who were not included now."
This would be sane.
The text I'm looking at is transparent fraud text. It's literally the type of text I would be writing if I were doing my best to commit a fraud, right now. Notice all of the emphasis on future funding rounds this year - and zero talk whatsoever about executing on the vision, i.e. using the funds. "We’d love to include a crowdfunding component in our next round of funding later this year, so you should hopefully have a chance to invest in future."
I cannot think of anyone with anything but pure, unadulterated, fraudulent intentions making this kind of a press release.
Show me a single press release written in this style, without any mention whatsoever of using the funds in any way. Oh, they seem to be executing all right: executing on raising money.
http://paulgraham.com/fr.html
" Don't get addicted to fundraising.
Fundraising is a chore for most founders, but some find it more interesting than working on their startup. The work at an early stage startup often consists of unglamorous schleps. Whereas fundraising, when it's going well, can be quite the opposite. Instead of sitting in your grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your software, you're being offered millions of dollars by famous investors over lunch at a nice restaurant. [26]
The danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are good at it. It's always fun to work on something you're good at. If you're one of these people, beware. Fundraising is not what will make your company successful. Listening to users complain about bugs in your software is what will make you successful. And the big danger of getting addicted to fundraising is not merely that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much money. It's that you'll start to think of yourself as being already successful, and lose your taste for the schleps you need to undertake to actually be successful. Startups can be destroyed by this.
When I see a startup with young founders that is fabulously successful at fundraising, I mentally decrease my estimate of the probability that they'll succeed. The press may be writing about them as if they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking "this is going to end badly."
"
So if this is the case, I urge this startup to talk more about its roadmap and execution, rather than (only) how much money they raised in 96 seconds. Which itself is a good achievement that we should rightfully praise.
EDIT: I've tried to delete the parent post.