Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

Sounds like many dysfunctional startups, many of which have impetuous CEOs who have been handed far too much VC money and have far too little management experience. Just take a look at what is / has happened with DataRobot.

The problem is that the anecdote, as originally told, was told poorly. This:

> They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor

... makes it sound as if the studio started the franchise—which is not helped by the fact that it says "Medal of Honor" (which is apparently a thing), not "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" (which is apparently the thing they actually meant). Anyone interested who tries to follow up based on these breadcrumbs is going to run into an issue. That is anyone—it doesn't take someone with a predisposition to being an asshole to end up here; even someone who read the initial comment and though, "wow, that's cool; I'm interested in learning more", and then proceeded to try to learn more would have gotten tripped up this way. (It's only by starting at the opposite end—with Call of Duty—and working backwards to its origin story that you're going to be able to resolve this.)

To make out as if someone is being automatically uncharitable and then airing emotion-driven grievances about it is, perversely, the most uncharitable thing (and, for the reasons just mentioned, perhaps only uncharitable thing) to have actually happened here.

Yeah this story has a problem.

An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality.

It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails.

It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'.

Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy.

Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity.

It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided.

I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward.

Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team.

[1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again.

I would reserve judgment on these situations.

Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.

Lots of small companies have this, since they often don't have any crosstraining or internal documentation of processes. Once a person leaves (quit, died, sick, whatever) there is no one else who knows what they were doing or how it got done.