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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#311

Post by robocat »

moomoo11 wrote: post #261

Dum question from someone who has no business experience but trying to start a company. If my goal is to build something useful for my customers, is there any harm in converting the company into a co-op or something when I get bored? I have a lot of money (not bragging, because it’s not like millions and millions, but I’m fine) so I’m not motivated by that. Rather I want to solve problems and create an environment wh…

There are reasons why successful co-ops are uncommon and that most successful organisations are top-down structures. A good way to cheaply and deeply learn the reasons for yourself, would be to join some co-op’s (or perhaps charities) in your area. A little experience within a successful co-op and within at least one unsuccessful co-op would go a long way. Good luck!

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#312

Post by robocat »

mattbee wrote: post #167

So this project was started in 2017, raised enough money from backers to get to (some) fruition, and was acquired within 18-24 months? Did its founders get a good payout from that, or were they just grateful to get funding to continue the project with someone else's capital? I can't tell from the article but this seems like a darned flash in the plan. Compare - I sold my bootstrapped company in 2018 after 16 years .…

> the CFO purchasing gobs of his company's own shares

It would be interesting to see how noisy that signal is. I wonder if there is a subset of people that would give a better signal? Maybe an external party that hasn’t drink the kool-aid and has enough inside information - board member? VC?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#313

Post by TameAntelope »

HWR_14 wrote: post #127
TameAntelope wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being willing to throw away work is the single most effective way I've seen at running an engineering org, both in terms of promoting innovation and in being able to quickly adapt to evolving customer needs as they get revealed. If your morale is harmed by throwing away work, that's something you should work on.

It depends on why you throw the work away. If it's because of issues that should have been apparent with minimal planning, it's disheartening. Obviously, throwing away work is important in general. But consider a project to do taxes that gets thrown away because legal says it's a law taxes be done by hand, that an accountant said used the wrong tax code or that marketing comes back and says it has to be a desktop app…

If you worked on a project for any amount of time that wasn’t put in front of users (who would catch obvious mistakes like what you describe), you aren’t taking your job seriously and have bigger problems than feeling bad about throwing away code.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#314

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

nerdponx wrote: post #121
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This but with a cycle of on again off again hiring freezes and the inability to fill open positions from employees that became disgruntled and left.

"Inability"

Basically the crux of it. As the poster above said "gaslighing BS". If you want to cut make cuts, make cuts, don't waste our time with making postings and doing interviews just to renege on it after.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#315

Post by thaumasiotes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #178
thaumasiotes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hire enough women, one of them will produce a baby within a month.

See, we just need that 9x dev. Once they've shown they can do it once it's perfectly reasonable to bet the entire business on them doing it the next month. Oh, and also, the diversity team have noticed we have hired a lot of young people so we're only hiring over-50s this year.

> Once they've shown they can do it once it's perfectly reasonable to bet the entire business on them doing it the next month.

That's true. A team of 20 women can easily produce one baby a month.

Nine women can't, but the people who like to say "nine women can't produce a baby in a month" are almost never trying to tell you that you can fix your problem by expanding your team to the appropriate size.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#316

Post by sverhagen »

ratww wrote: post #222
sverhagen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be good advise, but I hate it. Personally, I couldn't put my heart into the job hunt, while at the same time giving my best at the current job. In other words: just the step of starting to search for a job is for me synonymous to accepting defeat at the current job.

IMO nobody should "give their best" at a job they feel has enough red flags to warrant a search for a new one.

I agree, so I'd quit and find something better. That's all I'm saying: it's one or the other, not both (for me).

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#317

Post by dottedmag »

lovich wrote: post #81
hinkley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the death spiral begins. The death spiral becomes visible, really. The gun had already been fired, the body just hadn’t hit the ground yet. I must say these failure modes are much worse than the ones I’ve experienced, which maybe I should be grateful for, I’d have to think about this. Generally I’ve seen a slower burn, where the remaining fiscal year plays out with soothing tones and promises of not changing th…

> I don’t know which business school teaches people to say “ah can you smell that fresh mountain air” while they have their hands wrapped tightly around your neck … It’s all of them and the higher you get into management the more apparent it is. They sell a system of meritocracy where those who work the hardest get the rewards. Then you get into management and working side by side with people whose first job out of c…

> whose first job out of college was as a VP

What? How?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#318

Post by robbintt »

kurthr wrote: post #23
jmyeet wrote: post #13

As soon as someone hands you the check it's no longer "your" company and you should stop thinking of it as such. Only misery lies on that path. I see this on a smaller scale where ICs leave a company and take a copy of "their" code (ask Sergey Aleynikov [1] if that's a good idea). It's not yours. If you ever use it you could face legal consequences. And there's no code I've ever written that I wasn't convinced I coul…

Often acquisitions are set up with "earn-outs" so that only with the success of the project do you get the full amount of the buy. Even when that's not the case your reputation may well be tarnished by any failure (whether technical or managerial) of the product. I agree with your point though, which is to just walk away with the check unless you're willing to take a significant risks with either of those two other o…

Do you know where I can read more about the structure of "earn outs"? They seem like just another trap, to be clear.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#319

Post by andruby »

closewith wrote: post #205
andruby wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this happens to be about France, then I can second this. $116K AirFrance vs €39K software engineer. https://fr.glassdoor.be/Salaries/airfrance-pilot-salary-SRCH... https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Software_Engineer_%...

That seems like an example of selection bias. Does the average software developer in France earn €39k? Does the average pilot earn $116k? The answer is obviously not - do you have any salary data?

Did you look at the links? They both claim their numbers are averages.

I’m not saying they are perfect sources, but they do align with anecdotal datapoints.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#320

Post by HWR_14 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #313
HWR_14 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on why you throw the work away. If it's because of issues that should have been apparent with minimal planning, it's disheartening. Obviously, throwing away work is important in general. But consider a project to do taxes that gets thrown away because legal says it's a law taxes be done by hand, that an accountant said used the wrong tax code or that marketing comes back and says it has to be a desktop app…

If you worked on a project for any amount of time that wasn’t put in front of users (who would catch obvious mistakes like what you describe), you aren’t taking your job seriously and have bigger problems than feeling bad about throwing away code.

The point here is that programmers are assigned tasks, do them, and the management (whose job is to put it in front of users) is failing at that leading to wasted efforts.

Although I should point out that 2/3 of the examples would not have been caught by a user, because they are compliance related.

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