Last.fm founders quit

That's why you should start something that you really believe in. :) Start-ups aren't a get-rich-quick scheme -- it just happens that the market desperately needs some product or good that leads a select few company to explosive growth, which the media then focuses on.

It's getting a bit trite that every time Last.fm is mentioned (in good or bad light) that someone mentions libre.fm.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice project, but it's as annoying as constantly plugging your startups alternative to a popular service, the fact it's open-source doesn't dull that.

thanks! I didn't know libre.fm was so well-known around here.

There's lots of evidence that the best leader usually is the founder. For example, Henry Ford made his company possibly the biggest and best auto-company in the world (especially at the time) because he had a vision and the vision was to make vehicles cheap enough that anyone could have one. He paid workers the equivalent of $105 dollars an hour and sold vehicle the equivalent of $7,000 by the time the Model T was retired.

He was then forced to switch to the annual model that other companies were doing, which is currently credited with severely damaging the car industry due to the severe lack of brand cohesion. At the time, everybody knew the Model T was a very sturdy vehicle, but today you've got to rely on a models previous generations. Now car companies are considering Henry Ford's original model, instead of releasing a new model every year, you release a new model say every decade so that it gets progressively cheaper and more reliable. People with less money will buy a reliable model later in the cycle when it's cheaper, where as people with large disposable incomes will quickly switch to the new expensive version, which is evidenced by the iPod phenomena.

I have mechanics in my family, in fact my father owned his own shop at one point, and when you hear people discuss vehicles they invariably end up saying things like "The 92-95 were good cars, but the 96-97 were disasters". Apple wouldn't have turned the iPod into such a needless necessity by having bad models; the iPod Nano 1G was at serious threat of this with the whole easy screen breaking because they reduced the surface coating too much, however after a bit of a rough start the Nano is now of the same standard as the classic, you don't have to worry about the screen breaking (even though I think they still have to ship with a case because of the EU's 5 year lifetime law for electronic products).

The whole founders leaving the company appears to be a Web 2.0 invention. Creators now can get enough buzz about an idea for someone to pick it up and run with it. However, back even twenty years ago if you failed so did your company. IIRC Henry Ford had two failed automotive companies before he started the current company, I believe he also had a third which he used to get majority control of the current company from the shareholders; I believe his second company was a partnership with the Dodge Brothers. The Dodge Brothers Company was sold almost 5 years after their death, by their widows, and it was the biggest monetary transaction in the world, at the time. If Henry Ford had had the buzz around the mass production of the automobile, I doubt his first company would have gone out of business, however I doubt he would have had the knowledge and experience to run the business himself, famously without a single accountant during his lifetime and IIRC the longest period for a large company in the US to not be audited for taxes.