For the curious, looks like more info here: http://www.davecraige.com/magic/

Yes, thank you. That is the whole story. You can read it if you want.

I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf

I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My account was deleted. I contacted all 4 of the founders. Not one would respond. They went dark.

I would hope that no one else gets treated as poorly as I was and experience this type of disrespect.

> I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

That might be where you went wrong.

At the time, Magic was one of the hottest startups in the Valley. I was willing to hustle hard to get my foot in the door.

But I agree with you, I need to be more judicial with my time in the future.

Sounds like you got hustled. But it's a lesson learned, so at least there's some value there.

yea Mark, you are right. I did learn an expensive lesson.

One of my main frustrations though was that this was a very highly regarded YC company. Should consumers expect this disrespectful behavior to be accepted from other YC companies as well?

Should YC founders be expected to be able to simply pick and choose which customers they want to arbitrarily delete?

I can completely understand if this was a fly by night operation. But YC is basically the Harvard of startups and this was completely out of left field for me.

I'd be interested in seeing the founders respond to this.

We have stories like this every now and then with various companies, and here's something that makes me wonder: assuming that both parties are neither evil nor stupid (which I think is fair assumption in most cases), how exactly such situations happen? There's a lesson for every founder and manager hiding here.

I was screwed over by some startup founders that tricked me into working for free under the guise of "demonstrating mastery of Rails" and "proving my culture fit," but I wouldn't call those guys evil, just jerks.

So how does a situation like that happen? You justify it to yourself to cut corners in order to succeed, and because you're a job creator in America, you're entitled to respect in the end.

I would definitely like to hear the response to this before I signed up for their service!

Thanks for posting that.

Thank you

UPDATE: I reached out to the founders Mike and David on January 7th about this thread.

I received no response yet, but my twitter account was promptly blocked by David. http://f.cl.ly/items/1x3Y1h2n0i1Q1F3e1H1f/Screen%20Shot%2020...

I will be reaching back out to Mike in a week and will update you guys. Thx.

UPDATE 2 : I have reached out to Mike three times now. Still haven't heard anything back. Possible stonewalling.