Same question I had for Nebula: you had no idea that a month ago you'd have to shutdown, right?
I've started to follow these ex-CEOs so we avoid their next companies. This kind of shutdown is just terrible.
They would have become full-death experiences if the CEO had said, "Hey everybody, we're near death, just FYI". So in the alternative world where company deaths are always announced well in advance, far more companies would die. Probably not a better world.
I don't know the story here, but in most cases there was some deal on the table that would have saved the company but fell through in the couple of days before the announcement.
Regardless, the right thing is to have enough payroll in reserve for an orderly shutdown and transition plan for customers. It's not clear whether that's happening here -- I hope so.
Companies everywhere are shutting down daily with proper warnings to customers, employees and users. It's not uncommon for companies to give several months (or even a year) of warning that they are winding down operations, won't be accepting new users, will honor contracts, etc. And they are doing the right thing.
Every time there's a post here about how people should keep at least 3 months of salary in case things go south, the general feeling is that whoever is living paycheck to paycheck must be stupid. However, when it's a CEO that couldn't do proper planning and screwed the lives of employees and users alike.. oh, sure, let's give the guy a break.
EDIT: Let me anticipate the argument here that if anyone's "lives" were screwed then it's their problem that they didn't understand the risks properly.
tlb's argument is an interesting one, and so would yours be had you focused on its substance and dropped the snark and the elbowing—which was even worse in your original comment upthread. Indignation gets upvotes, but it also reduces signal/noise ratio and primes others for fight mode. Those things are bad for HN threads.
It would make no sense for every CEO whopse company is a month away from shutdown to be announcing "listen just to let you know, we are a month away from shutdown, but we are trying to find the money to keep going".
For many companies this is the default state of operation and undoubtedly many companies have gone from that state to great success.
What would employees and customers do in the face of such an announcement?
If you have ever been CEO of an ordinary company trying ot build a business then you'd understand.
Regardless, I think giving customers a large amount of time to migrate over, etc. should be a priority. I personally really like the way Runscope handled their change in fortunes. Screw VC trajectory and build a strong personal business.
Often they've got ideas that they might shut down because cash is running out but they generally have leads/prospects they're trying to pursue (or they fool themselves into thinking that anyway), until the cash actually runs out there's always a chance for a hail mary.
And revealing that the company is in pretty dire straight publicly would make any chance of breakthrough, investment or buyout nil, so why I dislike this kind of sudden shutdowns immensely the incentives really are against softly landing customers (and employees).
> name-calling of the first bit
When did I name call though?
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."