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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#91

Post by quickthrower2 »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #43
cjonas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with exactly 1 & 2 right now. #3 doesn't really apply in my case because 80% of the devs are budget staffing agency hires. But on that note, I'd add a 4th point: Management panics when they realize they won't make the self imposed deadline and start throwing bodies at the problem. In our case, we went from 2 teams to 8 over night. The very few engineers who actually were capable of shipping features became sw…

Classic. And when you tell incompetent management that 9 women can't deliver a baby in a month, they'll proceed to try with 10 women.

That analogy understates it. Starting a big fresh project with an idling “team” is really inefficient because the TL needs to figure out how to keep everyone busy.

The better way is to have a smaller number of people work on requirements and figuring stuff out before a whole team lets rip. Some tasks just don’t parallelise well so a 9 person team isn’t good for everything.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#92

Post by Kaibeezy »

hinkley wrote: post #32
ineedasername wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused in the metaphors but maybe the meaning mostly comes through :) My thought on trying it again though is that IP rights could be tied up in the old entity.

Not sure if metaphors or autocorrect.

I never metaphor I didn’t like.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#93

Post by Spooky23 »

ratww wrote: post #54
Ologn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fred Brooks encountered a similar problem as a project manager at IBM in the early 1960s, working on the software for the System/360. In 1975 he wrote The Mythical Man Month about the experience. He said "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". The increased communication needed was one reason. About half a century later, most businesses have still not learned these lessons.

I once on a company where a CEO did that 3 times in a row to an engineering team, and mentioned wanting that team to be 4x its current size in two years. In an interview, he mentioned The Mythical Man Month as one of his favourite books.

Everyone perceives things through their perspective. Dopey CEO guy sees himself as the surgeon leading the software “surgical” team described by Brooks.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#94

Post by Spooky23 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #42
illuminati1911 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is not the agile, but useless sinecure managers trying to rebrand "agile" as something in which projects don't need planning, can be completely chaotic and any requirements can be changed at anytime without affecting the deadline. "Hey we don't really need to make any decision ever or even know what we are doing. That's the great thing about agile!"

Projects tend to need substantially less planning than people think.

“Shit, the Oracle costs 10x more than the bullshit number we budgeted. Next sprint, refactor to SQLite.”

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#95

Post by alliao »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

> As soon as Sphero completed the acquisition, bringing Kelsus in as an app developer, two things happened: 1) Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room. 2) Sphero spent the first two of those six months organizing a team on their side and hashing out requirements for the new apps. This exact pattern has preceded every mismanagement disaster I've ever…

perhaps they are setting themselves for failure to predictably crash the stock so the supposedly acquiree can buy into bigger stacks of the supposedly acquirer's share. what seems like a acquisition may in fact be a pre agreed takeover by the smaller firm...

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#96

Post by yieldcrv »

Serious question: why do you care?

For some of my trades I use capital to purchase shares on the stock market

For some of my trades I have a 100% premine of shares and sell them at a higher price until I’m down to 20% left but only because I minted 500% more shares to sell to the PE guys

Its no different to me, a trade is a trade

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#97

Post by Spooky23 »

thejosh wrote: post #45
BMc2020 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me a a company I worked at, I can't say it's name, let's just say it rhymes with Dewlett Dackard. 1) Start with a $55 billion dollar company... 2) Hire a new CEO and cronies that are going to make miracles happen with with a very expensive acquisition of another company. 3) 18 months later the miracles have not happened. CEO and cronies are invited to leave with very generous golden parachutes. 4) Start with…

I also love the excuse for the last 3 years for anyone who made massive f'ups. "The last few years have been unprecedented times".

Meanwhile, competent people are rolling in cash.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#98

Post by cube00 »

sverhagen wrote: post #90
quickthrower2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word to the wise: start looking for a new job when that clock starts ticking. You may decide to stay but great to have something else to parachute into as an option. Second thing: you can change jobs as often as you want. I am for loyalty but you can’t know what a job will be like until you work it.

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.

It's something that comes with experience.

If you've had projects like this in the past you'll recognise the early warning signs (eg. hard deadline before (even rough draft) requirements are available).

You'll know it's time to start the job hunt early because there's no way it can work unless you work yourself 24/7 into the ground.

It's not about accepting defeat, it's about accepting you are worthy of something better.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#99

Post by b20000 »

kickstarters do not provide profits. i personally went through a succesful one and it was the same situation.

i also think it’s lame the article does not mention the marketing cost to reach the 188k funding.

also, building realtime synth / audio apps especially for professional use is a highly specialized job you should not outsource to generic mobile devs. you need to hire people who have been doing that for many years.

android has many audio stack related problems and those still haven’t been solved. someone who specializes in audio apps already knows that.

i get that the author is frustrated but the real reason people probably didn’t buy the product is that it was not good enough and not a “need”. to really want something it has to be crazy good. i’m surprised they got a deal from apple to distribute a poorly executed product.

it sounds like sphero and other parties were wowed by the idea and acquired or partnered with a startup with a prototype that was still far from a real product. i don’t think it’s fair to blame sphero in this case…

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#100

Post by happyopossum »

I think the real lesson is only sell what you’re willing to live without. Even if the initial contract says you get to stay involved, I wouldn’t take that unless I had to.

If the money isn’t enough to make me walk away from a project, then the money isn’t enough for you to bug the project.

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