Comment by robertlagrant
Comment by robertlagrant 4 days ago
The "millions of accounts" is highly speculative, is it not? It relies on the idea that failed startups keep their SAAS accounts enabled, rather than offboarding correctly.
Comment by robertlagrant 4 days ago
The "millions of accounts" is highly speculative, is it not? It relies on the idea that failed startups keep their SAAS accounts enabled, rather than offboarding correctly.
I agree there will some number of companies doing this, between 1 and $number_of_companies. I'm just saying it's pretty unlikely it's all candidate companies, which the article seems to be saying.
>> is highly speculative, is it not?
I'd say NOT.
Shutdown of a small company running out of funds is rarely fully orderly. Critical things may get taken care of, but everything is unlikely, as people have already left. Plus, with things like already-paid-in accounts, there's even an incentive to keep them open until the term expires, e.g., why not keep the prepaid ChatGPT API account live for execs and techs to use between jobs?
Just like wiping hard drives on EOL computers — everyone should do it every time, but people are always finding full HDDs and SSDs on eBay and Craigslist...
Not just this, but execs and employees like to keep websites live for a while while they job-hunt (otherwise their resume has dead links). And ideally keep their name@startup.com email working. But to keep those running requires a long tail of "live" DNS and finance stuff you can't quite close out.
You would think that because you're a reasonable person. However at my previous startup, which no longer exists, the new CEO failed to save the company and parachuted out so fast that the company who later acquired the startup couldn't get the domain name transferred to them because the CEO and CTO were both gone. They had to bring back the predecessor CEO because he was still able to log into the registrar to transfer the domain.
In the case of a fire, some less than conscientious people will fend for themselves first and don't give a second thought to anyone else.