<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Silhouette</author><text>Surely the lesson for start-up CEOs is even simpler: you are responsible for &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; in your organisation.&lt;p&gt;Like most here, I wouldn&apos;t have let myself get into the position of this freelance designer or chosen to air my dirty laundry in public. On the other hand, if I had sent a legitimate invoice and a CEO tried to fob me off with the kind of attitude claimed here (he says, noting that we haven&apos;t heard the other side of the story yet) then I would be extremely unsympathetic to flippant comments and requests to mess around with underlings. I imagine my response would be to send the final claim letter by registered post with a note that legal action would follow if the invoice remained unpaid after a reasonable period.&lt;p&gt;Of course, in this case, it doesn&apos;t matter: the Internet hype machine has been started, and if the reported claims are accurate, it is presumably a matter of time before everyone who has anything to do with this start-up starts forgetting to return their calls. Who wants to be associated with someone who thinks it&apos;s funny not to pay their bills, particularly when it&apos;s a small business working with another small business?</text><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I don&apos;t understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn&apos;t going to get paid and jump the gun?&lt;p&gt;But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it&apos;s very simple:&lt;p&gt;If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@.&lt;p&gt;You have exactly the same set of options with finance@, and your legal can still review the invoice, ping the vendor, or what-have-you, but you haven&apos;t escalated the situation.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. &quot;Send your claim to our legal team&quot;</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/vlrp7/yc_s12_company_refuses_to_pay_for_my_design_send/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>damoncali</author><text>I think the legal@ was meant to be equivalent to fuckoff@. That was my reading, at least.&lt;p&gt;Lesson: Get paid first when working with new clients. There just is no other way.</text><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I don&apos;t understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn&apos;t going to get paid and jump the gun?&lt;p&gt;But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it&apos;s very simple:&lt;p&gt;If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@.&lt;p&gt;You have exactly the same set of options with finance@, and your legal can still review the invoice, ping the vendor, or what-have-you, but you haven&apos;t escalated the situation.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. &quot;Send your claim to our legal team&quot;</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/vlrp7/yc_s12_company_refuses_to_pay_for_my_design_send/</url></story>