SEC charges YouPlus and CEO with defrauding investors

I worked for a CEO who did this once (the frequently-bombarding-the-team-with-new-ideas thing, not the expecting-applause part). He was a good guy, and talented in many areas, but he wasn't a great product leader.

He would let his excitement for some new idea take hold of him, and he would share it with everyone without first taking the time to sit down and reconcile how the feature fit into the rest of the app, what problems it solved, possible alternative solutions to that problem, the cost and complexity of implementing the feature, how the feature should be prioritized, etc.

This stuff and more is what sets good product people apart from mediocre product people. The problem is that it's all invisible and optional, so mediocre product people aren't even aware they're not doing it, and thus it's easy for them to believe they're great product people when they really aren't.

At some point he got the message that he needed to stop disrupting the team with these frequent ideas, so he switched to writing them out in gigantic Google Docs that he'd send to people. At least that was async, so it was less interruptive than him stopping at your desk, but it was still super time-consuming to read his docs. Eventually the entire team started ignoring them.

> why the investors didn’t do any diligence like requiring an audit

This is an unusual ask. Founders forging bank statements simply isn’t common enough to merit it.

I had a boss like this as well. It was at the first place I worked for after moving to the Bay Area.

We were a very small company, so it wasn't hard to be nimble, but it was exhausting to keep changing features or products we were working on, or never having the opportunity to satisfyingly complete anything we worked on. It was all the typical "lean startup" phrasing, disrupt, move fast and break things, "pivot", the things you'd see as jokes in that tv show Silicon Valley. Our CEO literally ended every single slide presentation with "We're going to change the world."

I don't remember how many times we "pivoted" over my five months there, but every single time it was just a new feature, we weren't actually changing anything fundamental about the business proposal, the product, or the customers. We also did not have solid metrics or any way of measuring the success of new features, nor did we have any information that proved, for example, existing customers wanted the new features (most obvious one was a "like" button). The overall feeling was our CEO was just floundering, he didn't have any coherent strategy.

Funny thing was, none of this made me leave. I finally decided to quit when he hired someone who started scheduling meetings at 9am and nagging me to be in at 9am despite performing well and having explicitly agreed to a much looser schedule when I started.

Oddly, we also went to Google once for a hackathon. IMO our CEO fucking RUINED that trip. The hackathon was supposed to be focused on using Google Play Store in some capacity, I honestly can't remember it all because this was nearly a decade ago. Our CEO was with us and insisted our team make a Google Play app for 404 pages (we were supposed to change our 404 page during that sprint, separate from the hackathon). And if that sounds dumb and incoherent, that's because it was. I didn't even know what we were building, and I'm pretty sure we left early to go work on our 404 page or some stupid shit like that. I'm not joking, and I remember the blank stares of others in the room when our CEO was trying to explain the idea of what we were going to build, nobody got it. We didn't get it either.

Sorry, really meandering comment here but I completely forgot about that experience until I started thinking about how that CEO didn't really know how to focus or communicate a strategy.

> Google Play app for 404 pages

Yikes

Standard behavior of a person suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-...