Au Revoir • Hacker News Board

Re: Au Revoir

#301

Post by monocasa » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #279

monocasa wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likewise, I can tell you from experience that nowhere near even 50% of the people brought in that supposedly have the ability to scale a company don't really know anything other than just enough pattern matching to cosplay as Jack Welch in front of investors, and how to minimize their blame when shit hits the fan.

This sounds like vague hand waving to me. What direct experience do you have with this to justify that claim? Obviously sometimes people brought in are nothing more than sacks of potatoes that make noises, but I think its insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved to believe even a significant proportion of people fall into that category. It's just a different set of skills to the ones for 'technical founder'…

I'm not sure how you jumped from 'similar levels of people brought in also don't have the skills to scale a company and simply optimize for the signals that the people who hire scalers look for' to 'scaling a company isn't a skill and the only things that matters are code.'

Re: Au Revoir

#302

Post by maerF0x0 » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

zbentley wrote: post #290

maerF0x0 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these people had to learn their way up the scale. I see little reason a founder CEO couldn't learn their way up the scale too.

> a founder CEO couldn't learn their way up the scale OK, but many (most, if others' claims in this thread are to be believed) of them don't do so. That contradicts your original claim, unless you want to say that many/most CEOs are not "reasonably smart", which is dubious at best and armchair quarterbacking at worst.

This is a good point. What's the pragmatic difference between can and does. Others have pointed out a good point too that many CEOs are so busy focusing on other things that they fail to do the learning they need to, effectively falling behind the needs of the company.

I mostly am rejecting the knee jerk reaction of "Company has grown 100x and now requires a new CEO" ... Who knew this would spark so much discussion?

Re: Au Revoir

#303

Post by dclowd9901 » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

bhntr3 wrote: post #233

dclowd9901 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is nothing inherently special about someone who runs a small vs. big company, except for experience. 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 starte…

I think what you're describing is the machinations of a capitalist society gone off the rails. Founders are focused, and what you're saying is they're focused _to a fault_. I don't think there's any fault there. Not every company has to continue growing indefinitely. That's insanity. The problem is the shareholders or boards who demand indefinite growth, and do so at the cost of their products, the most devout customers and their culture.

In other words, you can't use a broken system to criticize leadership.

Re: Au Revoir

#304

Post by haylem » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

Solomon being French - and considering the title - my brain automatically played tricks on me and as I read his post's title I pictured him saying "Au Revoir" in its most famous form in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 . :D

(It's the official good bye of former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing as he left office, and it's been used over and over again as a comic element.)

My hat tip to shykes. We studied in the same engineering school and he was part of the teaching assistants' panel doing the interviews for the new batch of candidates I was in. When I met him that day, he was in charge of testing my conversational English level and this interview (amongst others) convinced me to go for this school. He was also one of my tutors/teachers in the first few months, and I eventually became part of the same teaching team. Great guy all around, talented technician and a great educator.

I think he entirely deserves the praise for creating dotCloud and Docker, no matter what people may say about the underlying technology and the lackluster Docker activity lately.

He's turned it into a great product and company, with impacts and snow-ball effects all over the IT landscape.

Re: Au Revoir

#305

Post by gerdesj » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

tonysickpony wrote: post #292

gerdesj wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a reason why most startups don't go big" I think you are absolutely correct. I am the MD (CEO elsewhere) of an IT consultancy that is 18 years old. We have around 20 staff and t/o ~£1.5M. I like to sleep at night, I do have ambitions but they'll never be cool. Our business model will never set the world on light but we are one of many companies that you will never hear of that keeps the world turning. We ar…

I like what you said here. Keep a business for 18 year old is a success, and I can only imagine is challenging in many ways, could be boring in few. I have seen greedy consultant companies cutting corners here and there. Caring about backups, security and monitoring is great attitude in my opinion. Keen to hear more story about your venture.

Napoleon Bonaparte (might have) famously described Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers". I spend a lot of my time trying to live up to that ideal! I'll try to keep this brief ...

I was (1997-2000) a contractor in the IS department for the really large aerospace company in Yeovil, Somerset, UK (it's changed hands a few times). I eventually got to the team doing server management, app delivery etc ie third line. IS was due to be "facilities managed" and two of my colleagues approached me to be the MD of this thing they'd cooked up. The idea was we would go external and resell ourselves as a unit back through the on site supplier of IT/IS services. The supplier chosen by said aerospace company used to have a short name that matched the name of a famous sauce from these shores - it's brown (the sauce) and starts with H.

We rented a small unit down the road (proper rural around here) and had an old PC that ran Win 98 as a file server etc etc. We put in a ISDN BRI link (2x 64Kbs-1) for internets. We had one customer.

We moved on gradually and learned. Our first employee stayed for around eight years and then moved on - still in touch. Employees 2 and 3 (poached off a local travel agency - terrible pay there but we could better the pay despite being a little setup: E2 stayed for 10 years and moved on and sadly played silly buggers with customers - nothing too detrimental but still a bad taste left behind. E3 still with us, complications recently but all good now.

By 2013ish we now have around 15 odd employees. We have moved to a bigger pair of units in the same area that we started from. We now have modern systems involving (small) racks, virtualisation etc.

The norm for most companies is to rent but I wanted to own my premises. My thinking was that we could do more stuff. We looked for a while and ended up buying (story short!) an NHS clinic in Yeovil which is the largest town in the area.

We now have five internet connections - a leased line (100M) and four FTTC (ADSL 80/20) and a pair of pfSense HA routers running on Dell R310s (to be ditched soon - they can't do AES-NI) with a lot of IPSEC VPNs and OpenVPNs and 10ish internal VLANS. We have a proper computer room with proper gear. We also have a lot more customers these days. We are now ISO 9001 and 27001 registered and lots more stuff.

Every day I love going to work. Don't get me wrong - it's still hard. I came into work the other day and found an employee in tears. I sent them home (obviously, I can't say too much here). Two of our employees have moved on and then come back again (one of them was once a lover of one of my business partners). Thanks to our past involvement with a large firm whose name is saucy, we have several customers these days that you will probably have heard of.

One thing that I think we have is that we have three Directors - a Triumvirate if you like. Any two can gang up on one - it works very well.

I'm a very lucky person. I'll never be a millionaire but I'm very comfortable as far as I'm concerned. I'm a shopkeeper and fucking proud of it.

Cheers

Jon