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Comment by aditya34 | Hacker News Reader

"The employees tried to be the C.E.O’s friends, but we were not his friends. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; he dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us. He was expensive to work for: at least two of my co-workers met with therapists to talk through their relationship with him."

This is Suhail Doshi, the former CEO of Mixpanel https://twitter.com/Suhail

This article is accurate but barely scratches the surface of how cruel he was to his employees.

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Now, Suhail is starting another company, Mighty [1][2], a cloud-based browser.

I had a quick exchange with him about a potential position, but his arrogance and inflated ego left me uninterested. He shared very few details about the company, talking with a tone that assumed I was automatically convinced I would want to join just because he has founded Mixpanel. Hiring is a two-way street buddy.

[1] https://mightyapp.com [2] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/all-84-startups-from-y-com...

> a cloud-based browser

I cringed reading that. Assuming I might have misunderstood the product I looked at the linked pages and cringed even more. There is definitely too much money available to startups in SV nowadays.

As Mighty are looking into spreading their business model to other software types I suggest they cover the video player market next.

What part of the quote identifies him? From my reading it sounds generic enough that it could apply to a number of abusive CEOs.

Other users have identified the company as Mixpanel, so I'm curious about what specific hints I had overlooked.

A little bit before this in the article the company is described in enough detail that someone familiar with it would recognize it: "I read puff pieces about the analytics startup’s co-founders, now twenty-four and twenty-five, with one Silicon Valley internship between them ... the C.E.O. and the technical co-founder left their college in the Southwest to join. The startup had twelve million dollars in venture funding, thousands of customers, and seventeen employees."

Thanks for the followup, it fits in retrospect but on my initial read I didn't peg it.

Also the author previously listed the specific company on Linkedin or other bios.

Any chance you can elaborate on the cruelness, either publicly or privately?

A lot of it is in older reviews on Glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mixpanel-Reviews-E406910.h...

(This doesn't represent the current CEO or company.)

There is a lot there about the CEO's arrogance, bullying, ego, micromanagement. I've worked with early startup founders, the part that bothered me the most was his wanton cruelty.

Belittling employees or their work. Watching people leave (with families) pressuring them to stay late. Making employees cry (regularly), firing without cause and showing no emotional reaction. Calling people and their ideas dumb in front of others. Telling an engineer about an idea then declaring "if i thought of that, what am i paying you for?"

Here are a couple excerpts from glassdoor:

"-CEO is a dictator. -Fire as quickly as they hire. -Work/Life balance is a joke. -Culture is arrogant, stifling."

"One of my worst experiences ever. After someone was fired, management would send out emails to the entire company explaining why that person was let go (sometimes, for very superficial and even somewhat spurious reasons). While I'm all for keeping people in the loop, this sends a really poor message to current employees. What kind of email will be written about me when I leave or am let go? If I'm struggling with my own performance, should I expect the entire company to eventually hear about it?

It's a pretty well-known fact that Mixpanel treats their new employees terribly. I suggest anyone looking for employment at this company to keep searching or get a second opinion."

"This place is a revolving door. Every month the CEO has let someone great go.

Heartless management."

"- Horrible leadership: yes, he's young and relatively inexperienced, but the CEO also just treats people pretty badly"

Any CEO would be ousted out by board if he/she receives such negative reviews.

And was!

It took years because the CEO owned a majority share of the company.

> management would send out emails to the entire company explaining why that person was let go

a few months back we had a meeting for people to ask questions after someone was fired. Didn't leave me feeling any better.

Let's not dox the poor bastard

If he had ever made any attempt, written directly or otherwise, to apologize for his behavior firing, mistreating, and belittling close to 100 people, I would not feel compelled to name him.

Compared to those he mistreated, it seems he got away with it pretty nicely.

Actually I'm all for roasting people on skewers but I felt i ought to be the voice of temperance for once -- bring out the pitchforks!

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