151–160 of 249 posts
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he'd already be out if it was simple to force him out
Let this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
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L'etatt, c'est M'att.
For the unaware (or under-aware): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi Probably apocryphal. A lot of people these days only know it from Star Wars.
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
By the time they lay off truly essential people, you're burnt out, and you're lucky if you don't have to sue to get what you're owed by law, let alone whatever policy they had for paying out vacation time or what have you. You also get to enjoy a fun period of survivor guilt when they laid off people who you think have contributed as much or more than you have, and then know that you'll be next if they laid of already.
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For the unaware (or under-aware): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi Probably apocryphal. A lot of people these days only know it from Star Wars.
i am unaware of the star wars reference. can you explain that one please?
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
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Or it just sounded like a fun joke for a good company name... I mean you are not wrong, but pretty much any successful young entrepreneur must have some degree of excessive appreciation for themselves, and this one was already achieving that status at 19.
Knowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell. If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side.
the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
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I wonder if it's better or worse than the voluntary termination deal they offered to employees last year (first 6 months, then 9 months pay).
It’s worse. Max I’m seeing is 9 weeks.
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It is so hard to fathom that a leader trusted with millions of dollars of other people's money can be so disengaged from recruiting as to not see a hard wall of cash crunch, months if not years ahead. You can't assume fundraising will always go swimmingly. You have to always be in survival mode, and if that means not hiring aggressively, then you put on the breaks until the money comes in . Either as a leader you are…
The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which…
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wait, did he put his name in the company name? if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0. Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now. It could be Matt's been a…