Leah is out there creating things, writing code and spending valuable time on new ventures, despite the risk and opportunity cost. I admire her courage and creativity and I can't imagine why you would say something like this.

I'm sure she would have loved to have all of her projects succeed.

Grove.io is a high quality service. We love using it at Leftronic and are very sad to read this news. I wish Leah and her team the best.

I'm not sure what I said that was so terrible. I think Leah is great and I really hate hear news like this. I also agree that the service was good. My sole point is that companies that use this service also get hurt by this shutdown. When it happens several times as it unfortunately has in her case, you start to worry about new ventures disappearing too.

It is in no way a shot at Leah or her work. It's just a recognition of history.

Your first sentence was the thing you said that was so terrible.

But every sentence afterwards put it in context.

I don't agree. You can't start with a statement like that and then backpeddle - your lede has the most impact and is what people remember.

He had a chance to edit his post to better reflect his position, but chose not to take it. I wish he had.

(And to complete this, lets not forget that Rayne is also a person who just made a mistake. It is the action which is bad, not the person).

He didn't backpedal, he explained his reasoning for making the first statement. Hard and a bit unvarnished, yes, but understandable.

I agree. Best of luck and keep coding!

What's with the hagiography? Culver made things people came to depend on, then those things disappeared.

I don't see how this is any different than picking up women and telling them you think they're serious girlfriend material in a context (business services) where that's the expected standard, then dropping them for the new hot thing.

Why is it suddenly acceptable to do this just because they called themselves a startup?

You're making statements which depend on information you don't have. How do you know grove.io was dropped for the new hot thing? Perhaps they weren't making money. Perhaps they were being destroyed by the two larger startups in the space?

Why do you assume the worst of this company? The rest of your statements in this thread are really aggressive, and rely on very negative assumptions, which do not seem to have a basis in fact.

>How do you know grove.io was dropped for the new hot thing?

Because that's what happened to her last six projects?

Are you completely incapable of inductive reasoning or are you being obtuse so that you can make the total unaccountability of SV founders a moral crusade?

Wow, that escalated quickly. Try to remember that you're talking to and about other people. Jumping to the worst possible assumption about other people is not a kind thing to do, but it's all I've seen you do in this thread. As a result, I'm out.

The funny part is that http://convore.com/ redirects to grove.io with the shutdown notice :)

So damn true. Soon grove will add such a notice

We should take bets on how far the, "we're gone, but here's our new thing!" chain will go.

Was my first thought to, no real explanation of why they are shutting down either. If something is a low friction consumer app, it is expected that many will evolve and pivot.

With something like a business tool though I want something that is going to be around for the long term and it would be a factor on further products she creates.

From experience I know a startup is hard and things don't always go to plan so I can sympathise there, just that when choosing tools for business stability is a factor.

List of projects by Leah Culver: http://blog.leahculver.com/about.html – Hurl, Baconfile, Convore, Pownce, and Grove.

And yet you just did.

As a community we praise people for trying, then when it fails we pillory them? A dick move, sir.

  pil·lo·ry [pil-uh-ree] noun
  a wooden framework erected on a post, with holes for securing
  the head and hands, formerly used to expose an offender to public
  derision.

Is that really what grandparent did? I think it's an unfair characterization. It was a personal opinion stated weakly and with restraint, not some attempt to incite a mob.

I have no opinion on this specific startup. Perhaps they've provided enough time to migrate; that's for their paying customers to judge. But it's naive to think failures doesn't affect your reputation. It does, and it should. Do you really think savvy users won't take your track record into account when deciding whether to use your service? It goes against their interests, and nothing is more darwinian than a startup.

---

Here in silicon valley we say that failure is ok. And yet accountability is also good. There's a tension here.

Perhaps failed startups are fine for investors, who might have diversified into many different vehicles. They're more problematic for customers who rely on a product. And paradoxically, the closer a startup gets to solving a hair-on-fire problem, the more careful they need to be about how they treat their customers on the way out.

Even if investors claim failure is ok, is that always the case? I suspect past track record does play a role somehow, even if it's subtle and hidden behind the scenes.

Even if failure is sometimes ok, there are failures and there are failures. A lot depends on how the wrap-up was carried out, and how people feel about it.

When startups are few and creation is to be encouraged, failure can be ignored. When startups are plentiful and failure starts to be taken for granted, perhaps it's time to emphasize accountability.

I agree there is a tension for customers. However, what I'm objecting to is the HN community's reaction. We're the people who are pro startups, who think failure is OK, who encourage pivoting from unsuccessful products to markets we discover along the way.

The grandparent is the opposite of what this community is about.

And attaching their name to it is worse. Saying "I'm starting to not trust this startup" would have been much more acceptable in my opinion.

She hasn't said why it failed. As a paying customer (via ScraperWiki), I find that frustrating.

It gives me little new knowledge, and makes the move seem sudden and strange. From the outside, Grove looks quite successful.

A simple "we only had 20 paying customers and we think SaaS IRC doesn't work for reason X" would be fine. That she hasn't said that, to me implies there is something else going on.

Hope she's OK!

If it came off that way, I apologize. I was just expressing the thought that popped into my mind when seeing this. I'm not at all trying to judge her. I think she does excellent work and has just had a few bad apples. I hope her next project is successful.

I think you might still have time to edit the post to come off the way you intended.

You might have time to drift down off that horse you're on and give the guy a break. So what if he's judging someone? He made a valid comment about the fact that this person supposedly consistently lets users of their startups down.

I'm pretty happy up on this horse. Acting like that to people is not OK. Calling it out as a dick move is the way to combat it.

You say "supposedly" but you just assumed it was "valid". So without evidence or context, you took him at face value and now assume bad things about the person in question. That's why it's a dick move.

* Pownce - shut down * Convore - shut down * Grove - shut down

I think the guy is really just telling facts. Unfortunately, it means that the next project may have users worrying about when it'll be shut down. (There were actually comments to that affect when grove was announced on HN).

Also, I think the underlying issue here is that none of those services cost anything to run, so they seem to have been shutdown because of other factors - perhaps a lack of ability to see things through.

I wish I could create things that people might actually want but I can't think of anything that I could make that people would want.

The vast majority of the time, if you build something that scratches your own itch, there will be others out there that will also find it useful. The challenge is to find a big enough itch.

I always find this to be terrible advice. Most programmers have similar itches, if you scratch your own itch, you are going into a lot of competition with many other developers. Why not solve a problem for an industry that gets much less attention? Maybe success rates would be much higher if we stopped all building the same things.

I never said anything about building tools for programmers. I'm actually a major proponent of building apps and tools that scratch non-technical itches, or more specifically, intersecting your development skills with your hobbies or interests.

unfortunately for those of us who don't have any non-programming/tech interests that doesn't leave much left. :)

(uber, taskrabbit notwithstanding..)

The subject matter of your software doesn't really matter. Building software is what is fun, using the latest tech is fun. Who the end user is, won't affect your day-to-day very much.

It seems that the companies coming out of YC now are scratching a very diversified set of itches, for example YourMechanic.

you could start with a replacement for grove.io.

heh. can someone recommend an alternative that also supports connecting via standard IRC protocol?

Try https://irccloud.com, just set up a channel on any public IRC server.

Companies are shut down for a variety of reasons, and entrepreneurial success is often equal parts idea, luck, and hard work. Leah has built several popular products with loyal followings - which is more than a lot of us can say.