"Jungle Dave", Founder of Jungle Disk, Leaves

fwiw, I didn't have a contract - I could have left at any time. I stayed because I really enjoyed working at Rackspace, which is a great company. Leaving was a very difficult decision but I felt the team and product were more than able to carry on without me.

I bet on average it's just a little bit past the end of the contract, for contracts that are > 6mos.

If it's the kind of company that people don't leave, they might not specify a long contract.

I also suspect it has to do with what kind of leadership the founders have after they are acquired. It's very, very tough to go from a founder that runs a company to being eight down from the acquiring CEO and having every decision triple-guessed by middle managers. (I'm increasingly a believer in that ribbonfarm article about corporate structures. Using his jargon: someone who was once a Sociopath has to report to a Clueless.)

Jungle Dave might have great insights into scalability issues, but I don't see how creating Jungle Disk required any scalability knowledge at all. Amazon handled scale-out. JungleDisk is a nice abstraction layer over S3. Perhaps their server-side augmentation stuff (public web view of files, etc.) required some scale-out?

Isn't scalability supposed to be one of their core competencies?