Here's my personal retrospective (and rant) on StartCOIN/JOIN. I won't be bashing it but I won't pull any punches either.

Let me start by saying that I think StartCOIN has been an interesting ride.
 
I've seen some real potential. There was the event with Kim Dotcom where he announced the plan to fund his next project through StartJOIN..we saw Max throwing out some pretty big words about what he believed the value potential could be..even Russel Brand seemed to be involved at some point. And of course we had Karl, who was seen as a ambitious, knowledgeable and successful guy at the crypto game. The various connections to BnkToTheFuture and Dixon also helped to reinforce a serious image (I personally think he seems like a trustworthy guy).

However now when I look back at everything it feel there's one thing all of these "selling points" have in common, and it's hype. Not so much actual technology and innovation. While the concept itself surrounding the StartJOIN platform is far from the worst I've stumbled across in the crypto community, it's not really that groundbreaking on a technical level (not that it necessarily has to be in order to be successful). At its core it's basically a website connected to a blockchain. The coin and chain itself seem to have received more or less zero effort while the website and promotion surrounding it has gotten full attention. I thought okay, fine, as long as the site is going to keep evolving.

However the web development side has been lackluster beyond belief. The single single most critical aspect of the whole project and they have not been able to deliver it in a satisfactory manner. Karl mentioned in a video x months ago that the team were working hard on the development. He went through a list of things they would do that week, one of them being to implement a fix for some kind of annoying bug on the login page. I can't remember the exact details but it sounded like a 2-3 hours fix (I'm a web dev myself). I remember thinking that if I was responsible for all development for the project I'd have likely fixed his whole to-do list in one day. That lead me to believe that his staff of programmers couldn't possibly consist of more than one person and that this person could not be hired to work full time on the website but perhaps more like 8 hours per week. This is INSANE considering Karl could easily afford to pay for more hours per week. I could be completely wrong on this of course; perhaps he spends massive amounts of money on this. My gut feeling as a developer says otherwise however. If this is the case then I can understand why we had to wait so incredibly long for v2 to arrive while the site came to a complete halt after the breach.

So now they've announced that Max is officially leaving the project and that they will stop all development on StartCOIN, instead handing it over to the community. This will enable them to focus all efforts on the website. While this seems to be a smart move since the site obviously has way too few resources allocated to it..it also raised an important question: how much extra time and resources will this move actually grant them? Again, it's not like we've seen the coin itself develop much at all during its entire lifespan.

Do I think Karl is sitting there plotting how to trick people into buying into the hype? No, I believe he still genuinely tries to make the best of what he got and to deliver a complete product. His mistake however and the general theme I've seen throughout this whole thing is that they exaggerate the size of the team and scope of what they can actually deliver. Just being honest about it and gaining support that way, perhaps through volunteer programmers and other people interested in helping out would have made the experience much more pleasant for everybody involved. Seeing new code being committed and watching the site develop every week. Less suits, big words and promises.

All in all, I think you sometimes need to lower your guard a little in order to allow yourself to invest in risky ventures. To allow yourself the risk of ending up with the short end of the stick, if you will. At the same time it's important to always learn something from when things don't go your way. When it comes to StartCOIN I feel it has been an important lesson for me (and probably many others) to dig deeper into what I'm actually investing in and try to resist jumping aboard mostly because of hype. I wish the team the best however and for everyone who has invested in the project. Hopefully Karl will be able to steer this half-sunken ship into greater things. But I think they need to reconsider the approach and be more transparent. Do more, show more, talk less.