AngelList acquires Product Hunt
This smells fishy to me.<p>ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal.<p>I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meeting), seemingly funnels most of that money into things that simply make promoting <i>other startups</i> more effective, but don't create value or revenue, and then gets bought by another startup <i>who shares multiple investors</i> for (supposedly) something around their ridiculous valuation.<p>I guess it's probably not outright fraud, but somehow we ended up in a scenario where we have investors shelling out (in some cases paying themselves!!) a (rumored) total of ~28 million dollars for a community website with no real revenue, no actual product, not even any technology that they could theoretically pivot on... it's just a glorified phpBB theme with a relatively small community of fans who just happen to all be in on the take as well. And I'm sure all investors involved get to mark it as a "win" on the books and pad their stats.<p>Next time Silicon Valley tries to portray itself as a meritocracy I guess we can just point to this...