People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. Does this warrant their eternal membership in the tech community's pantheon of evil?
It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have some ability to spot big ideas.
People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story.
I'd be fine with the negativity if that was even what happened. But it's not.
They didn't "fail to execute". They were fairly far along in the process of executing ("the previous HarvardConnection programmers had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users could connect with each other", according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU), and would have finished up just fine with someone else if Zuck hadn't signed on and lied about progress specifically to delay them (that this was his intention came out pretty clearly in the IM conversations that were leaked a couple years ago, he basically lays out his plan to feign progress so that they don't look for someone else to finish ConnectU up before Facebook launches).
It's one thing to get beat to market because you didn't hire the right programmer, that's a straightforward failure of execution; it's another thing altogether to get beat to market by the very programmer that you hired to beat the competitors to market. That makes you a victim of fraud, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.
It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have some ability to spot big ideas.