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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

Success can hide a lot of problems. Companies with wildly successful products have a strong bias toward "we must be doing everything right," when in fact the truth is only "we did some things right at some point".

That bias can make it hard to change things, even clearly broken things. It can make it hard to introduce new products, since anything new will be tiny compared to the old successful product. It can make it hard to get rid of bad managers, since their bottom line looks great.

For a view from inside this phenomenon, read http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

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This exactly, and sometimes it can be more than just a broken process or two. It could be that the rumors you hear are true, that there's some dirty secret that will eventually surface and endanger the entire business, and that there’s no bond of trust with executive leadership to confront it before it’s too late.

I worked at a unicorn that seemed unstoppable until allegations of fraud surfaced in a major publication, its customers started pulling out, and investors filed a lawsuit. The company shrank dramatically over a period of months, pulled out of a flagship office move, and today is a fraction of its size before the turmoil.

Zenefits?

Were any of the allegations true?

Theranos?

Amazon.com?

Is this Outcome Health? http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/ct-biz-out... seems to line up with some of the details provided.

> "we did some things right at some point"

or got lucky, but attributed the success to ability/execution instead of learning the right lessons. Then, because of over-confidence, make poor decisions and cause problems down the line leading to failure (as "luck" runs out).

I experienced this first hand. I was at a founder’s second company, after the first one had a successful exit. The second company was in a similar space.

There were a lot of things that we got ridiculous pushback on, justified as “at company X-1 we only needed 2 salespeople. We don’t need more than that at company X”. There seemed to be a lot of things where it seemed like he thought he’d figured out “the formula” when it was really just a lucky break. I didn’t stay long. 10 years later, they did have an exit, but it was on a dramatically longer timeframe than the first company had, and I suspect a lot of that had to do with bad choices that had worked out at the previous company.

i've heard this phrased as something along the lines of "winning solves all problems", which is a double-edged sword.

"winning" doesn't really solve all the problems, your problems just become secondary or tertiary concerns, and the fact that they haven't been solved doesn't immediately matter...

This is so true, and I have unfortunately observed this personally too many times.

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