231–240 of 305 posts
Kinda funny that the page is down ... you'd think for a company that helps everyone scale their services this would not be a problem :-)
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.
His little boat seems safer... it's a joke, pls don't read too much into this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any reasonably smart CEO Sorry but this is extremely naive and I'm sorry that your naïveté has caused you conclude things which are simply not true. This is a very strong assumption, and a lie that is peddled by the media (Zuck is the greatest example of this) to create a novel story. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a dangerous assumption. For the record, I've interviewed over 75 software founders (CEO/CT…
Based on what? All of you here saying "they don't have what it takes" have yet to elicit one actual skill that a founder could not _learn_ as the company grows. There is nothing inherently special about someone who runs a small vs. big company, except for experience. I agree with the poster above: classism at its finest.
I think the question is, given that someone can do one of those things really well, how likely is it that the same person can do the other really well too?
It seems obvious that the kind of traditional business ceo that investors often want to find to replace a founder is not going to be successful as a starter. Let's just accept the common assumption on that one.
I'd argue that what makes a great startup founder often makes a terrible leader for large corporations. I think every great founder has a reality distortion field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field) which projects their vision, keeps them pursuing seemingly bad ideas in the face of insurmountable odds and allows them to overcome the biases and assumptions that dominate so many business decisions.
Some leaders expand and adapt this to build great, crazy companies: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg (maybe). Often they also create a cult-like, maybe toxic, certainly messy corporate culture that still somehow succeeds.
Others can't do this: Travis Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes, Parker Conrad. They let their "startup founder, growth at all costs, thumb your nose at the rules" attitude destroy their company culture and embroil them in ridiculous, easily avoidable legal issues.
In my experience, a corporation's culture is the manifestation of the most extreme personality traits of its leaders. There is a time, when crossing the chasm, that the exact traits that made the company grow rapidly and the founder extremely successful are the ones you want to suppress to create a stable, efficient and effective collaborative endeavor involving thousands of people: a corporation.
I think (and this is due to some reflection on my own ideas) that if you reject the idea that there comes a time when a company should abandon "burning vision" in favor of stability, process, predictability, and broad appeal, you're actually rejecting the idea of a corporation as a hierarchical system of power deployed to efficiently organize the work of thousands of people. And I'd probably agree with that. The traditional corporation needs a traditional ceo but it's a damn shame that every revolutionary startup has to end up as a traditional corporation.
Kinda funny that the page is down ... you'd think for a company that helps everyone scale their services this would not be a problem :-)
I'm not sure resource scaling is what's needed here. Just good ol' caching. Shameless plug: I built Cachoid[0] for caching as a service (leveraging Varnish mainly) to help with situations like this. [0] https://www.cachoid.com/
Also, adding caches is still resource scaling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
He’s put his heart and soul into the company for 10 years, is wildly successful, and doesn’t think he’s the best person for this next phase. I don’t think any back alley drama needs to have happened.
Nobody wants to be a one trick pony. Even if you are successful beyond your wildest dreams, people want more than one act in their lives.
If I had founded docker, I'd be retiring now[1], because I've done other things and this might feel like the cherry on top. But he's only 34.
[1] If I knew how, which I don't. At best I'd switch fields and start over on something else I care about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But it is worthy of note that right now, the top 6 largest companies (by market cap) in the US are or were helmed by their founders well into their fortune 500 status with many thousands of employees.
Kinda funny that the page is down ... you'd think for a company that helps everyone scale their services this would not be a problem :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When did that become so hard -_-
Because a blog at scale is still a complicated piece of software? You need to implement caching, DoS protection, security - something a hosted blog vendor might have experience in.
How common is it for a company to flourish after the original sole founder leaves?
Having seen founders forced out by the board first-hand multiple times, I've yet to see things really take off after the departure of such a key player.
I'm curious if, on average, it's really the right move.