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Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

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Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#101

The question I would try and answer if I were in your shoes is the following: Does he want me to leave the company or does he want me to stop writing production code for the product? If its the first one, there is likely a personal issue between the two of you that needs to be resolved one way or another. If you think the second option is what he is really trying to communicate, then I would look for other opportunit…

agree completely. I'd have a frank discussion with him and attempt to determine if this is political. If it is, fire him immediately even if there's short-term pain because the politics will fk the company anyway.

If it's not political, and you agree with his assessment of your production code, then there's an R&D role that probably needs filling and that you've already proven you can do - finding profitable market niches and creating prototype products/services to address them.

Don't sweat being a "bad coder". Every coder (yes, even the awesome ones) feels a little worried that their code is bad, and he's just playing on this insecurity that we all have. Part of the 'your code is crap' syndrome we see in tech is just defensive projection.

You managed to build a production system that is gaining traction, which is amazing. Go do more of that :)

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. > The rest of my advice assumes the CEO (your co-founder) has quite a bit of confidence in the CTO. This is the case, it is in my interest however to remain in the company because my equity is vested, the sooner I leave the less I will get in return, apart from my time, and opportunity cost I invested all my personal wealth.

You need to sit down in a room with the CEO and CTO, and have the CTO describe his concerns and then you can all resolve the issue together. For the sake of the culture of the company you can not let this slide as back-room talk, as that would create a poisonous culture. When that is answered talk to a lawyer before signing any papers, and remember that the companys lawyers are obligated to protect the company and no…

I don't know exact your situation but I saw similar case. In summary, the founder who showed support to company without ego made company successful, not the CTO or VP engineering who joined later stage. That’s your baby, but to CTO, that’s neighbor’s. You are happily clean up your baby’s diaper or mess, while neighbor will blame you and not clean up. If you need process to get enterprise ready, you can hire process guy and experienced enterprise software guy and adjust your team. I think when CTO say it to you, he have talked CEO already. In that case, if CEO is mature, CEO should stop CTO blame you and discuss that matter with you first. If you are not sure about CEO’s intention, you should talk him and understand about it. In this case, I feel that CTO have hired couple of his guys and they are all point same direction. But don’t be afraid those and think whether you still can help company or not. (I think you still can help company) you should talk to CEO and let him know that company need you for technical evangelist or customer meetings or … and at last as back up to CTO. (For me, It seams CTO is a type of guy who build castle inside house, which will cause problem soon within organization.) By the way, you should consult with the lawyer if possible, and understand what you can get worst case.

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#104

I had something like this happen to me (on a larger scale) - I folded, and regretted it for years. Firstly - go straight to see a lawyer. Do not consider anything else before you have done this. Play hard, don't blink! Secondly. If things don't go your way, play the long game and take your time. Make sure that they know that this will not be resolved quickly, and that having this hanging over them will frustrate thei…

What happened to you?

I co-founded a company that grew to around $200Mil valuation in three years (not big by your guys terms, but exciting for all involved). We realised our own limitations, so we brought in the big guns to take it to the next level. One year on they got rid of four of the four founders and shafted us over vesting - taking about $18mil off each of us.

There are two sides to every story - we didn't adjust well to being bossed around. But at the end of the day, once they decided to get us out, they played to screw us over entirely. All I expected was to be treated fairly - how naive. For example, their lawyers pounced on me as I was leaving my moms funeral (still in the church grounds) - knowing that this was where I was. Eventually I just wanted out - I took a ridiculous offer of just getting my initial investment back because I was disgusted at them and wanted to move on. Next time I would dig in more!

Edit: ONce I left it took a while to get over, but my life has been amazing since then, so all good!

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#105
Fire the CTO, asap!

Do not underestimate yourself, you can code and be very helpful to the company. You definitely do not need that type of CTO at this point.

Comments like "your code is not good enough" are completely subjective and if anything show malicious intent to cut you off.

I would talk to a lawyer in terms of what is the best way to do it though, such as you can maintain your equity and influence in the company.

DO NOT let that a-hole take advantage of your hard work and dedication you have put in your OWN company!

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#106
post #2

First off, I'm sorry about your situation. Nobody here will be able to judge with any degree of accuracy whether he has a point. I personally would not look at this situation as a technical one; this is a business relationship situation. Regardless of whether there is any grain of truth, the CTO has lost confidence in you. Not just a little bit. He has asked you to leave. The rest of my advice assumes the CEO (your c…

Thank you for taking the time to respond. > The rest of my advice assumes the CEO (your co-founder) has quite a bit of confidence in the CTO. This is the case, it is in my interest however to remain in the company because my equity is vested, the sooner I leave the less I will get in return, apart from my time, and opportunity cost I invested all my personal wealth.

The questions you want to be asking are to a lawyer regarding corporate law given your current situation. (Talk to your own lawyer, not the company lawyer who represents the company and not your interests as a shareholder)

I would work on retaining control of the company and your shares, possibly isolating the CTO in terms of power, if not outright dismissal.

The CTO is way out of line speaking to a board member, and majority shareholder like that. I assume you are a director and hold ~50% of the company in addition to a few of the officer positions in the company. Utilize corporate law to eliminate risk to your portfolio.

The tech shit is completely irrelevant, you should be discussing with the other shareholders how out of line the CTO is and your contingency plan for dealing with officers who are not respectful of the owners of the company.

Also check whether the company owes you any debt, if the other founder can't come up with the money you could also use debt to take control. Again, talk to a lawyer, and keep in mind that it doesn't matter if the company tanks if you're not going to be part of any success it has. Scorched earth the mother fucker if no one wants to play ball. (Shareholder and board meetings can be a great way to get internal feuds into the corporate minute book)

Do you think anyone at Facebook cares that Mark Zuckerberg is not their top coder? (And even if he was do you think that the best value he could provide to the company would be from writing code?)

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#107
If you feel that you've been used, you're right. Here's how you know:

1) did your co-founder grasp your skill level when you were both starting the firm? I 100% suspect you were forthright and yet your cofounder/ceo ran with you.

2) I'm sorry to break it to you, but you probably already suspect. For reference, read how Larry Ellison pushed out every one of his cofounders of Oracle in order to get the pie. Zuckerberg: did the same thing. Bill Gates and Ballmer pushed out Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. Yet Allen and some of Zuckerberg's 'pressured-out' victims still got paid. You need to get paid to. You got the firm to the point it's at -- your intellect, your creativity, your hard work.

3) You've already agreed to the supposition "the CEO (your co-founder) has quite a bit of confidence in the CTO." Why is the CEO unwilling to do the right thing about you and say 'he stays, he was here first, he laid the groundwork, we got where we are because of him and me together, he stays.' That is not a good sign that your cofounder is not backing you up.

4) My older brother was in your situation, part of the original ownership of the firm, they hired a pro outsider to take the reigns to scale it. That outsider's first objective was to bring in his people and he got my brother fired. The reliable cofounders then fired the outsider. Just as in your situation, my brother had invested in the firm. You may not have a reliable co-founder. OR. The CTO is playing 'divide and conquer.' Try to figure out which is the case. If the CEO/your cofounder hedges, you can't trust him.

5) Some companies keep on cofounders even if they're 100% green about business issues. At first, Sergey and Larry (google) did not want any advertising at all. Advertising made google. Larry and Sergey were too dumb about that part. They got talked into it by pro outsiders. Then Larry waited many years but he finally runs Google. He was a grad student with zero business acumen. But they remained loyal and gave him time to learn business strategy, develop business acumen, etc. Neither Larry nor Sergey got pressured out, and if the investors tried 'divide and conquer' to steal the entire business, they underestimated Sergey and Larry's commitment to each other.

You're probably being 'pushed out' and you may be in for quite a battle -- go see an attorney and tell him what's up and do not sign anything in your startup.

Your minimal objective is 100% vesting of all your equity. If your investors get paid, then you -- most likely owner of common shares, not preferred shares -- might also get paid. But if you allow yourself to be pushed out, you've kissed away a chance at some common shares enrichment -- in a company you started. That's a huge deal. Maybe once in a lifetime. Maybe.

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#108

The question I would try and answer if I were in your shoes is the following: Does he want me to leave the company or does he want me to stop writing production code for the product? If its the first one, there is likely a personal issue between the two of you that needs to be resolved one way or another. If you think the second option is what he is really trying to communicate, then I would look for other opportunit…

I agree with you. Of course, I don't know the full story but given what I have seen in the past I would guess it's the second option.

Some of the coders simply can't deal (or, more accurately, their egos) when someone less skilled is above them in the hierarchy.

If this is the case, I'd say just fire him. It sucks now, but will save from a lot of pain later on. For instance, when you hire someone else who might happen to be less skilled than the CTO.

Good software developers know that there are less skilled people, they used to be like them, and deal with that appropriately (i.e. with respect and without offending). And then there are prima donnas who can't deal with working with another human being for whatever the reason is.

At the end of the day, being a good software developer is not all about writing code. Far from it.

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#109
Don't shoot the messenger.

Could it be the CEO/the bizguy who wants you to leave? Could he brought up the idea? I can hardly imagine that a hired CTO dares to say something like you wrote without backing.

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#110
You need to hire an attorney, one who works in business litigation (if you can find someone specializing in minority shareholder disputes, that much the better). Right now. If you're delaying on this point out of some idea of wanting to "try to fix things first" or "not wanting to be the bad guy," you're just shooting yourself in the foot and downing blood thinners to keep the wound from clotting. Working with an attorney is not the same as filing suit, and you will never be worse off in this sort of situation for having sought outside counsel. You also need to find your own attorney; the company's counsel works for the company itself, not for any of its investors, executives, or employees.

Judging from your story, your situation is pretty clear: you're being squeezed-out. Sadly, it's not uncommon. Though he might not be asking you to leave right now, framing it as in a few months is just an effort to (i) get some additional benefit out of you, and (ii) give them the time they need to break you.

There are two possibilities right off the bat: (i) the CEO is involved, which is likely given the difficulty involved in squeezing-out a shareholder + 50% co-founder; (ii) the CTO is working alone, hoping to push you out the door and benefit in some way from the resulting vacuum. In either case, you can't move forward without speaking to an attorney. And don't you dare think for one second that you can "just talk to the CEO first."

Already, you're talking about things as an employee rather than an owner. That's your first mistake. An employee might be able to be kicked to the curb, but you're not just an employee. You've already made a significant investment into the company, and from their perspective, an ideal/successful squeeze-out is one that deprives you of that ownership interest entirely. Most of these efforts are successful because they manage to position the person being targeted in a position where they just roll over. Ideally, they force the person being squeezed out to choose to quit rather than actually be fired. It seems like that's the CTO's goal in your situation.

That said, there are few programmers, in my opinion, whose work is so bad that there is zero potential for future improvement. Considering the costs of pushing you out, you'd have to be doing a hell of a lot more than just writing shit code to justify termination. Given that they want to wait until after additional fundraising rounds are completed, I doubt that your involvement with the company is nearly so problematic. Besides, you already stated that there's been a clear improvement in your code.

I was in a similar situation, once. I was foolish, stupid, and trusted a friend I've known for years. I did the development work, partner A brought his business skills and industry contacts to the table along with his money (and a third partner, B, as well). Did the work, but during that time, there was no sight of their money. One of the earliest clues I was going to be screwed was, when discussing fundraising, A mentioned his own deferred pay. Something I thought slightly peculiar given that he was supposed to be investing his own, significant funds along with B. Plus, I don't believe that he actually did any measurable work during the time period that would justify it based on what I knew at the time. Investors are rightly finicky about deferred salaries, and the bar is pretty high to justify them.

When we were at the end, I found myself being squeezed-out: in the end, they apparently figured that it'd be cheaper to outsource to some ridiculous "startup in the box" type of company rather than deal with my deferred pay and the long-term consequences of a third founder's ownership interests) even though doing so would delay things by a couple of months. They even managed to time things well: the weekend of my grandmother's funeral, after A had been told about it, they dropped their little bomb on me. The only good thing was that they walked away without getting a single line of code that I'd written.

My parting was anything but on good terms. Eventually, I wound up not pursuing the matter in court--talking it over with my attorney, it became quite clear that the legal fees of fighting them would be ruinous. That partner C was a shyster of an attorney, and all evidence suggested that they'd just try to wait out the expensive clock rather than consider settling. After all, the cost of doing so would be pretty minimal. Litigation is uncertain and expensive. Painful though it may be, you never ever litigate on principle. Not if you have any brains at all.

Even though I would have likely prevailed given the facts, I would have come up horribly in the red when it was done. A pyrrhic victory and no more. Choosing not to go down that route was one of the harder decisions of my life, made all the more difficult by the knowledge that they had, quite literally, taken even my grandmother's funeral away from me.

Oddly enough, I'm probably better off for it now that I have some distance and perspective to look back. When they launched, it was unobserved and uneventful. Even now, they're unknown with almost no traffic and engagement. They've also made a number of bad mistakes that I had identified--often through trial and error--that I had told them about. It was a submarine rigged for silent running, deep and quiet, that's never bothered to surface for air. All of partner A's vaunted experience and extensive media contacts in the industry proved for naught in the end. Eventually, they'll simply wither and die on the vine. Had they not squeezed me out, no doubt I'd still be hanging on trying to turn things around. After all, who abandons a friend? It was quite the learning experience, albeit an incredibly expensive one.

Luckily, you can avoid that sort of experience by acting now to protect yourself. Document everything, save all of your emails, chat logs, download and archive all Github comments on everything that you've worked on, as well as everything else you can. Make sure that you're also grabbing copies of emails off any servers/accounts they might have access to. Even though it will create problems if there's any litigation, there's a high likelihood that they'll do something foolish such as delete them.

You have a lot going for you right now that'll help you. First, you're obviously still needed to help their raise funds. Second, investors are scared to death of founder disputes. If any potential investors even sniff the possibility, they'll run and never look back while your current investors will raise holy hell, even if the CEO+CTO were able to find some fig leaf of justification. It also implies a deviousness that will scare investors; if they're willing to screw a friend and risk such a serious dispute, then it's also possible that they'll wander into similar situations in the future. Particularly in the early stages, investors and VC firms don't have to put up with that sort of bullshit.

This gives you an absurd amount of leverage: you have the ability to single-handedly kill their fundraising efforts now and in the future. You need to call your attorney and start using it. At the very minimum, it'll put the breaks on any plans they're currently working on. At best, it'll help you move forward as a company without having these sorts of problems lurking about in the shadows.

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