What I Did

Note: This post is the conclusion of What Would You Do?

So there I was, riding the crest of the bubble, with dreams of startups dancing in my head, when a private list of angel investors fell into my lap. What did I do?

I didn’t have a lot of ethical options. The biggest quasi-ethical play I could have made would have been to cold-call these people and solicit them for investments. Investments in what, I didn’t know. I had nothing concrete to invest in. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and had no partners. In short, I had nothing to offer and was months if not years away from even thinking about funding of any kind.

There are other people in this world who can just fire up the bullshit machine and start spewing until dollars start flowing. They work out the details later. I get the sense that many dotcoms were started that way, in fact. For better or worse, that just isn’t my style. Even if that was my style, that list wasn’t mine to use. What felt very exhilarating at first just seemed depressing after a few moments of thought. Yes, I had found a valuable hidden gem, but it wasn’t mine to keep.

So what did I do? I did exactly what @AdamD said in his comment on my previous post: I sent the author an email telling him about the problem. I explained how I found it and what he should do to fix it. I almost didn’t send that email though… I was worried that the author might claim that I had hacked his site or trespassed in some way. That isn’t as far fetched as you might think: I hear that eBay will claim a form of trespass if you scrape their website for data instead of using their API. And while legal matters are pretty murky on the Internet today, they were far murkier 9 years ago. So I waited for a response, unsure of what – if anything – would come back.

A few days later I got a reply from the author, who was happy I told him about the problem, but he wasn’t nearly as worried about it as I thought he might be. After all, having an angel list isn’t nearly as valuable as having actual relationships with those angels.

As a thank-you he sent me a t-shirt from his company which I wore often while playing hockey for many years after that.