221–230 of 305 posts
I love the art made for the post. It's so emotional and powerful. The letter told the story, but the image made me feel the story. So simple, but yet so powerful. Also, @solomonstre has changed his Twitter profile picture. This is brilliant communication. He lets everyone know that he has moved on to other things, just from his profile picture. I think this is very interesting and clever.
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There is a reason why most startups don't go big - burning vision is not even close to being the right formula for success. Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000. Just like precious few individual contributors are comfortable with and able to contribute meaningfully in this wide range of environments, it doesn't make…
I disagree with the number of employees making things drastically different. 1, 10, or 10,000, it doesn't matter as long as the leader has the fundamental organization skills need to control groups of people. It's easier to hide the lack of organization in smaller groups, but the end state will be the same regardless. "Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization."
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The implication is that the (especially American) upper class is trenched on this belief that CEOs of large companies require a certain pedigree that may not be based on observable, empirical evidence but rather on a mythos to keep the upper class relatively "pure" and the number of rich CEOs controlled to (mostly) existing class members, while attempting to appear egalitarian ("anyone" can go to an ivy league school…
It's not classist to want to hire someone with experience for a job that demands it. If your money and your startup was on the line, would you want to hire only junior programmers and hope it works out? No, time is of the essence and you have investors who put their faith in you, so you're much more likely to put people with experience in charge.
The "classist" question is why is the pool of people with such experience so small and seem so exclusionary?
One specific thing mentioned up thread is the perception that not a lot of small, startup CEOs "graduate" to large, corporate CEOs and asked the question why doesn't "small, startup CEO" count for more experience in these searches than it seems to? The people that believe that classism may be to blame wonder if it is simply and inevitably because they are outsiders to the "proper" upper class or other such cliques. Anecdotally, there seem to be counter-examples on both sides of that hypothesis, and I don't think either side has enough data to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
"Our goal was to harness an obscure technology called containers" Was that really the goal? My impression was that dotcloud was just a hosting company
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> Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. What is the evidence for this? We can throw anecdotes like Apple on one side and Unilever on the other, sure, but is there any study saying e.g. "Of these 100 promising companies founded in 1990, x% of the founder-led ones were successful by 2010 whereas y% of the outside-CEO-led ones were?" Making a bold claim like "Companies…
It's also entirely possible that Jobs would have run Apple into the ground in the mid 80s. Apple III and Lisa were expensive, unmitigated failures, and the Mac arrived as Jobs was leaving. Would Jobs have gone along with the high-price/high-margin strategy of Sculley/Gassee?
Of course dotCloud ended up being a precursor of Docker itself, and took the idea of "lightweight easy-to-create container" to an even higher level. shykes if you are reading this, hi!
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I think the phrase you're looking for is "exceptions that prove the rule". For every CEO that took a company from nothing to 10k employees, there are so many more examples of the opposite that you can't even begin to name them. You're able to name the exceptions because there are so few exceptions.
That phrase is widely misused. The intended usage is where a rule is implied by the explicit stating of an exception. For example, a sign labeled "No Parking 9AM - 7PM" states an exception, and implies that parking is allowed outside of the time. The stating of the exception proves the existence of the more general rule. In this case, the appropriate term would be "survivorship bias". Those who survive are noticed an…
Language changes constantly, and meanings often flip from one century to another. The previous meaning of "prove" doesn't obviate the modern usage inside or outside of the phrase in question or turn the clock back. That particular horse escaped the barn, long, long ago along with tens of thousands of other changes in the last few centuries. "Probable" existed before probability theory did, and it didn't refer to odds or math; it just meant "respectable."
I could follow your own suit, I suppose, and compliment you by calling your comment "smart", since that word used to mean "painful" in olde english and you prefer the old ways. But I won't. (I'll just say your comment was interesting, and not quite the full story.) I roll with the common currency: language as it is. Print greatly slowed these sorts of changes, and the internet will slow them even more, of course, as the decades and centuries roll on.
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Having read this I wonder what really went down. I get that his shares are fully vested, but personally I would not walk away from such a role at a company with this kind of growth and mind share.
If everyone had that kind of mindset, Elon Musk would still be running PayPal.