141–150 of 203 posts
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I'm kinda curious about your >$100k loss on your stock. Your strike price from pre series A options was more than the gains on a near $600 million sale price? Maybe I am misunderstanding, but how is that possible?
If the OP is telling the truth, there is no way he lost money on the stock he bought. The early shares are all up.
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Over the years I A/B tested each of my interview questions in order to better measure what I was looking for. It sounds like you might have been asked an early version of one of the questions I used to ask so sorry you didn't get the "optimized" version. (there was a big difference in responses between only 3 years and 10 years to live) Also, to clarify, I used to end my interviews with TWO questions: (1) if you had…
Reading the op's post and your reply, I can only come up with two possible conclusions: 1. The op is lying about his experience. He states he answered NO to question 2, which is what you claim to be looking for. Unless his answer to question 1 was "Work for Optimizely" (which, I guess, someone might say, maybe) then I don't see how you get a contradiction. By your logic, he would have been a hire. 2. The recruiter li…
And you are right, I did hire people regardless of their answers to some questions and I would then assess how they turned out to figure out if my questions were any good. I basically gave everyone I interviewed a pass on at least one question even if they bombed it abysmally. Some of those folks turned out to be our best employees so I learned to never hold one bad answer against someone. It also gave me a dataset to improve my questions for the next wave of candidates.
I interviewed for a marketing role at Optimizely back in 2013...I passed all the interviews with the team and then had a final, short interview with the CEO. He asked me a few basic questions and then asked 'if you only had 3 years to live, would you work at Optimizely?'. I responded honestly and said no. Said that I'd love to work here to help and grow the business, learn, and further my own career but if I had only…
Huh, I don't know if I know one person who would honestly answer that question with a yes.
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I worked at Optimizely for 4 years and can tell you that pivoting to Enterprise has been one of the best company decisions. One of the important distinctions between Optimizely and most developer-first platforms is that experimentation is a hard practice to pick up. Most companies have difficulties getting their programs off the ground and keeping them funded, let alone grow or scale them. Small digital businesses st…
First off, love the username :-). You argue that pivoting from self-serve to enterprise was one of the company's best decisions. If that were true, Optimizely would be considerably more valuable now than it was four years ago, which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, if the self serve model was indeed fatally flawed, then it would not be possible for anyone to build a profitable business serving this segment. Howe…
I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most "hot startup" lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5/5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Drop…
I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell. Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valua…
I completely agree with you on (at least in terms of Twilio's experience):
> would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn't pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?
We were definitely going to hit a ceiling if we didn't add enterprise features and work on getting all the various certifications that large companies will require to even start talking to you, and build a sales force that knew how to sell to larger companies. If we hadn't done all that, we'd be a much smaller company today, and likely a competitor would have done it instead and eaten our lunch.
The problem I had with Optimizely when it was the go-to solution, was that it had a truly problematic impact on front-end performance due to the blocking way its script was loaded and page variants introduced. In some cases page loads were blocked by up around 5 seconds. For obvious reasons it was tricky to run an A/B test just for testing the impact of Optimizely's script itself. But the key issue is that all the si…
Just kicked the tires on Optimizely for a site with less than a million MAU. They wanted $50K upfront for one year. No monthly or quarterly billing available. Went with Google Optimize instead, works fine for free. In the face of that, very surprised Optimizely doesn't do month to month to get folks started.
Full Story has gone this route. They used to have a plan that would work for smaller companies, now they have nothing between their free tier (1000 sessions a month) and their lowest level paid tier which is "5 figures annually" (they won't even announce any pricing on their website, though not sure if they ever did).
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The acquisition share price is usually told to employees. They probably got the information from current employees. Since they are a shareholder, they'll eventually find out anyway.
I was involved in an acquisition as a shareholder. I was nigh impossible to get anything out of the executives. It was an acquihire so maybe things were different.
You're certain you were a shareholder and not an option holder? That is, you had exercised some of your options?
Another possibility, since you said it was an acquihire, is the company actually shut down operations and sold off its assets to the buyer. Maybe in that case there would be no share price to report since no shares were bought? I'm not an expert.
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I was involved in an acquisition as a shareholder. I was nigh impossible to get anything out of the executives. It was an acquihire so maybe things were different.
That...sounds illegal. You should at least have gotten a document in the mail with the buyout details, after everything was finalized and signed. It may take a few months in some cases but they have to send it out. You're certain you were a shareholder and not an option holder? That is, you had exercised some of your options? Another possibility, since you said it was an acquihire, is the company actually shut down o…
I spoke with (paid) two attorneys (employment and business) at the time and they said there wasn't much I could do. In the grand scheme of things it was small potatoes. I was pissed at the time though.