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You really need to stop the personal attacks and trying to raise a downvote brigade against my comments, just because we disagreed about a law and culture topic.

I wish the site admins would place a clear written policy against these and other personal attacks next to every comment box.

It got great traction and decent press coverage, in fact I was a bit surprised when journalists decided to go with a nudity angle. In the end I never pursued it further, due to another startup I was working on at the time.

Seems a bit comical that the article claims this to be the first disappearing photo app. I created and launched one myself a year before Snapchat started...

The normal way for start founders to receive equity, is only from one or more of these 3 things:

- For hours worked, based on the vesting and usually the hours must be beyond the cliff or you get nothing.

- If you built a crucial part of the IP that the company needs to buy from you with equity.

- Cash invested up front - less common.

He fulfilled none of those. Not even close to being a cofounder. Ideas aren't included among those.

The effectiveness of the relationship between investors and startups in SV is built on upon being upstanding and not being overly manipulative. Founder/Investor agreements that are born from the manipulation of unexperienced founders always should be EXPECTED to turn out badly.

There's a child-like expectation that once the deal is signed or agreement is made that it's over. It never is, that's just the beginning. If you're expecting that everything is finalized as soon as an agreement is made, regardless of the conditions, then you're simply bad at business and taking risks that you haven't yet realized.

(Of course this isn't true in Europe. They love taking contracts extremely literally, and their economies suffer enormously for it.)

So many accelerators behave wildly unprofessionally and inappropriately for the space that they're in.

Perhaps all that's needed is more high-visibility guidelines like what YC is doing now. Perhaps we need better platform for evaluating investors from the founders perspective, instead of networks that really only care about evaluating startups.

Either way, the situation seems to be getting worse, with the continued explosion of accelerator programs around the world. I hope we find an effective solution.