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My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

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Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#111

Post by ionwake »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #96
booleandilemma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it works in a nutshell. Lots of talkers out there. The people I know who do the real work are the ones at the bottom, and you don't know them because they keep their heads down and focus on writing code. The people that self-promote the most are the ones least capable.

Time spent coding is a zero sum. Leaders are needed to identify how to do use that energy and time. In terms of business success. This might be the #1 thing (granted I’m entirely speculating). Are your priorities correct and do the engineers know them? This is not that easy. People will argue endlessly over when to address tech debt, how much security is enough security, how much to deliver early vs fully formed, wha…

Nah I disagree 20 years in the industry across fields and most management was just incompetent. I concur with the earlier poster.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#112

Post by kasdi »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #40

Are all VCs like this or did OP strike out with some bad apples?

I don't think the VCs are to blame at all. This is a one sided story but that side already gives off so many signals of not being cut out for the job that it isn't surprising to see them heaping the blame on another party. If you're the CEO and you are looking for capital you don't do that whilst giving the capital providers a mandate to run your company by proxy. That's on him. If VCs tell you to do 'X' and you don'…

ChatGPT: How can I tell my VC to shove it, but politely?

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#113

Post by fuzztester »

thih9 wrote: post #91
fuzztester wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! Reminds me of a project life cycle cartoon I first saw in a software book early in my career. Just now searched for "systems analysis tyre cartoon" and selected this page, which seems the best, on a brief look, since it has both some history and multiple versions of the cartoon: https://www.businessballs.com/amusement-stress-relief/tree-s...

There are more modern versions too, with additional panels, like: https://pmac-agpc.ca/sites/default/files/Tree.jpg I especially like “how the customer was billed”.

My link actually includes yours and many more, even non-computer ones.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#115

Post by kasdi »

jacquesm wrote: post #107
Dylan16807 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fair to assign a lot of blame to the person that told you to do it and paid for you to do it as the owner of a good chunk of it. You don't think that should have any blame at all ?

The 'C' in CEO used to stand for something.

Clever Elephant Operator?

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#116

Post by coldtea »

colemannugent wrote: post #23
powera wrote: post #6

A riddle: how do you know that an anonymous Reddit post is exaggerated?

Seriously, ~120 comments and this is the first one to question the posts legitimacy? The reddit poster goes on to comment: >15 minutes phone call to decide to file for bankruptcy and for them to take their money back (and then some) and shut down my company What? In no world would that happen. Even a mostly failed company has quite a bit more value than $0. No mention of the name of the company or even the vertical.…

Not everything is meant literally. When he says they ended up with $0 doesn't have to be $0, just hugely down and nearly worthless compared to before that was doing well.

In the same way $100M could just have been $99M or even $80M, and then $0 they started with could just as well have been $20K in savings he invested.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

jacquesm wrote: post #107
Dylan16807 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fair to assign a lot of blame to the person that told you to do it and paid for you to do it as the owner of a good chunk of it. You don't think that should have any blame at all ?

The 'C' in CEO used to stand for something.

It certainly isn't "takes all the blame no matter what happens".

Especially when they're up against the people that own the company!

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#118

Post by wlesieutre »

sneak wrote: post #103
adwn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * And the average American doesn’t know that things they take fir granted are luxuries even to Western Europeans.* Such as? Name three examples, please. "smartphones and cars" doesn't cut it, those are pretty common even for low income citizens here in Germany at least, and we don't really need air conditioners on account of being located in higher latitudes – everyone has heating, though.

High quality food delivery (at any time, but especially after 22:00). 24 hour pharmacies. 24 hour grocery stores. Air conditioning. Cheap gas. Road trips where you have a personal vehicle when you arrive. Hot water in 100% of all handwashing sinks. Urgent care centers. Whole Foods. You're 100% wrong about not needing air conditioning in Germany. Many of the last 45 days here have been above 24C. You're just used to b…

24 hour grocery stores aren’t that common. Walmart used to be known for being open all the time but they mostly close at 11:00 now.

For the Americans, 24C means “many days have been above 75F” which I don’t think is going to get a lot of sympathy.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#119

Post by janstice »

ethbr0 wrote: post #86
somestag wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions. I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I though…

My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.

That sounds like someone who will make a four-page fizzbuzz solution, which was at one stage a highlight for us.

What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#120

Post by opportune »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #104
opportune wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies have generated hundreds of thousands of extremely high paying jobs because hundreds of millions of consumers/many businesses chose to give them money.

[flagged]

Tell me exactly how these companies are destroying the earth. Snark isn’t an argument

My point isn’t even about shareholder value. Both consumers and very many employees have benefitted from these companies’ existence.

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