nikkidurkin

I'm the author of the piece, and this has been my passion project for many years now. I'd love to hear thoughts from the community :-)

Unfortunately you need Minecraft for Mac/PC: Java Edition to use mods, so modding won't work on the education edition.

Tim Ferris

No, that's not it. I actually ended up talking about it my mixergy interview

Just telling it like it is. I could have lied, but how does that help anyone?

I'm a firm believer that with gender issues you can either whine about it, or you can find the positives in it. If your whole startup depended on you getting a visa approved, you'd use anything at your disposal to get the job done. If that meant fake crying, then so be it. It worked.

5 full time staff, an office, flights, marketing expenses - that all ads up. Apparently we were burning a third of what a startup at our stage normally is with our team size, and I even thought that was a lot.

Thanks! Will look into it. I want to sell the assets if I can, but I think I'm just ready to move on and take a break.

At the end of the day, I am the CEO of the company. It was my leadership that got us here. Even if something wasn't executed right by one person on the team, that is still my responsibility. Furthermore, we were killed because we ran out of money - also my responsibility. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Just a few points:

1. Even though I'd already spent 2 years on the startup, the first co-founder I bought on had the same equity as me. He wanted it, and I wanted someone fully committed.

2. I was off fundraising for 2 months, and my mistake was not communicating that really well with them. I wasn't a great leader at that time. However, I did notice something was off but I just thought it was post-yc depression (which is actually a thing, apparently). I asked them outright if everything was ok, and they said sure, that it would all be fine when we got back to Australia and moved on. I trusted them, and they lied to my face.

3. I think they were very naive, not malicious, in how they left. They thought everything would be fine if they just left, but thats not how startups work.

4. One of them refused to talk to me or give me an explanation after he left. I had to practically force him to meet me for some closure. Its like getting a divorce with no explanation.

I made mistakes too so its not all on them, but at the end of the day a co-founder is supposed to be your partner through thick and thin, and they bailed without talking through the issues at all which equates to stabbing me in the back. And they made sure to tell me this after I'd reimbursed them for thousands of dollars in expenses for their YC adventure.

The purpose of this is NOT to discredit them. I'm not a huge fan of them, but they dont deserve to be villified. I'm just trying to be a bit more transparent about what happened so that its helpful to some readers. I'm sure they've learned from the experience and will treat their next cofounders differently if they do start something else.

I think it was a combination of bad luck, timing, and some bad decisions on my behalf. I learned a lot from the experience.

Actually, we had a team of 5 working on this. Running operations is really intense and time consuming. There is lots of customer service, community management and making sure items arrive at their destination. Then I was there to work on product and I had 2 developers as well.

I looked at the figures, and although it might be possible to cut out all the tech/product side and just leave operations, then we would really be in a zombie state. I thought it was better to cut our losses and move on.

There are only 23 million people in Australia, and its a small population spread over a huge area. That means shipping is expensive, which isn't great for trading low value second hand fast fashion items. An item that can get shipped for $2.80 in the US would cost $7 at least in Australia.

Also, Australia Post doesn't have any APIs to automate shipping. Girls had to physically go to the post office to ship items, and there wasn't tracking either. This meant a lot of customer service headaches.

Hey Andrew, I actually glossed over that out of respect for the 2 guys. My purpose was not to bitch about them, and many people who will read this post in my network will know who I'm talking about. There were mistakes made on both sides, but in the end I bent over backwards to accomodate them and as soon as YC was over and they could say they were YC founders they bailed. I'm not saying its entirely their fault - I should have picked up on the warning signs but I was off fundraising for 2 months and didn't notice. But I did consider them my friends, and they didn't care what position I was left in if they were to leave. Anyway, I'm sure we both learned a lot from the experience.