this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email (hackers.town)
submitted 8 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] noride@lemm.ee 33 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'd say he's a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 30 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

running through the sales playbook big time over a post with no readers

and now the original blog post, which had almost no readers, is front page on HN as I write this, and (in between the sociopath apologetics) even the horrible nerds are noticing he's bizarre on privacy, GDPR and AI obsession ...

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 8 months ago

Dare I say... womp womp?

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AI obsession

To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It isn't in this post, but it's in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it's still trying to put AI into everything.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

They didn't pivot.

The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Doing the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they've got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there's only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).

At this point they're probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they'll be having to raise their prices...