How I Failed to Change Wasmer

Not saying that he wasn't... as much as a "late" co-founder is a thing... just that the motivation for making hime that might have been a little bit sinister.

> The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the company by airing all of their dirty laundry on the way out.

Wait, why is that a problem? Let all be aired and let us figure it out for ourselves. We're all adults. If the situation is indeed as the cofounder claims, a cleaned, distilled version of events is untruthful and patronizing.

And if the events aren't as claimed, startups are evaluated on their ability to hire the right people. If the CEO chose a cofounder who would lie and destroy the startup for no good reason, then that also reflects poorly on the CEO.

I, for one, appreciate the signal that Wasmer is a startup to avoid doing business with

Ah, so the author of this blog is a humanitarian

I was a very early employee at Wasmer and worked with Ivan for part of that, though I ended up leaving after roughly four months to go back to university. At the time, it didn't seem too bad but, in hindsight, it was a pretty toxic environment.

That was partly a result of a lot of pressure from larger companies that didn't want to work with Wasmer because Syrus, the founder, was publically rude to other people working on WASM (among other things).

Ivan is a really awesome guy and deserves work that values him. I wish him the best and can vouch for his technical ability.

> The author seems to be making live changes to the article. It started as “How I failed to Change Wasmer” but it’s now titled “I’ve loved Wasmer, I still love Wasmer”.

People second guess themselves when they write something emotionally charged and it goes semi-viral. So what? Wouldn't you? That doesn't make the article any less valid. A title change is very different from materially changing the actual events discussed, yet you imply something of this magnitude is going on (it isn't).

> The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the company

Maybe for you. For the rest of us, being a toxic founder who exhibits even a third of the bad behaviors mentioned in the article would be grounds for forced removal. Looking over the timeline and events that took place at Wasmer, it's pretty clear this dirty laundry needed to be aired, and everyone (the users, the employees) would benefit if this CEO is actually removed. Perhaps this idea makes you uncomfortable? It's also super disingenuous to paint this as an attempt to sink the company -- clearly it's an attempt to say the product has tons of promise but the CEO needs to go. All other options have been exercised at this point, so going to a public forum with huge industry influence is exactly the kind of thing that could solve this problem that otherwise probably has no solution other than the company floundering. The CEO could quit tomorrow, and then this entire endeavor would obviously be justified and well worth it.

> I also wish the author would have elaborated more on their original title (“How I failed to change Wasmer”) instead of laying all of the blame on the other co-founder and alluding to toxicities

In a literal sense you are right to say that the author doesn't discuss this much, but come on man, it's super obvious -- this "late co-founder" was not given enough control or say in the first place to make any of the changes that needed to be made. Heck, he couldn't even take a sick day without incurring tremendous ire. Most of the article is about that. Did we read different articles? It's like you're going way out of your way to trash this for no real reason other than it makes you feel uncomfortable. Airings of grievances like this are one of the good things about Hacker News and have a positive impact on the industry. I dare you to come up with a single example where that isn't the case. Show me an example of a startup that floundered because of disingenuous HN exposure that wasn't caught until way too late. If anything they'll have a sales bump today.