What a messed up article. I don't know this CEO but using a picture taken at a festival two years ago as proof of incompetence seems very cheap.
And it doesn't even make sense! Taking a vacation every now and then is likely to improve productivity, and for SoundCloud specifically, it seems almost necessary to go to Burning Man and mingle. The criticism is especially rich coming from a guy who looks at least twice as stoned in his official TechCrunch photo than the SC CEO at Burning Man.
Creating SoundCloud is more than 99.x% of people ever achieve, including me, the author, and the editor of this shameless excuse of an article. SoundCloud is obviously beloved by many. If they don't find a way to get those people to pay, they're in good company.
At least they're not selling to AOL.
> Now staff morale is in the toilet, the user experience is a mess, the subscription models are unappealing, competitors are growing rapidly and musicians are fleeing to other upload platform.
I really thought TechCrunch was getting better, but man this is bad journalism. It's like a hit piece in a high school newspaper.
To be fair, this seems to be the unfortunate norm these days.
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What was the original caption/photo? Right now, it says:
> SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung would be replaced if the company receives the new funding
FWIW, in other articles, it's been insinuated that Ljung went off to Burning Man at a time when Rome was burning:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcl...
> By August 2014, it was abundantly clear that the SoundCloud’s advertising program, which would allow artists and labels to collect royalties, would not launch as planned. Despite Toig’s promises, not a single major label had agreed to a deal. The project launched with a eleventh-hour pivot to focus on independent creators, with Toig later apologizing at an all-hands meeting for failing to sign the majors...Ljung assured everyone in attendance that the label arrangements would eventually get done. A few days later, he flew to California and went off the grid. It was time for Burning Man.
Further down in the article:
> ...The stalled deals also affected internal operations at SoundCloud headquarters in Berlin. Though the $150 million round never closed, managers had been instructed to double the size of the company’s 150-person engineering team.Meanwhile, Ljung continued to travel the world. In May 2015, he spoke at a Burning Man–esque festival outside of Las Vegas called Further Future. In June, he showed up in an ad campaign for Italian luxury company Salvatore Ferragamo. When SoundCloud employees from around the world flew to Berlin for an August retreat, he was nowhere to be found.
The tone is converging on unhinged.