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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

When Spolesky brought on this guy, I was shocked. He had no profile or activity on Stackoverflow. He wasn’t even a developer and his resume indicated he was just generic management talking head. Given how much Spolesky emphasis “product person” to be in charge as opposed to white label MBAs, none of that made any sense. I’d to only imagine he was cashing out and part of the deal from investors was to place this guy who they trusted to grow “enterprise” business. Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined?

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> Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined?

That's literally there in the definition of a VC-backed business model. You get a lot of money now, in exchange for some amount of ownership and expectation that the business will grow, whether it makes sense for it or not. The investors want a return on their investment, so they absolutely will push the business past the point of breaking; if they can extract their return before it burns down, then they win.

Or, in short, from investor PoV, startups are cattle, not pets.

I feel like putting a talking head in charge of SE risks limiting growth. SE is a business that benefits greatly from leadership that understands their core demographics.

I'm sure they still still grow, because SE is an incredibly useful product. But I think a bad leader poses a serious risk of constraining natural growth by pushing monetization too hard and driving away organic growth.

It's quite clear that Spolsky simply cashed out and went home.

The best way forward is for someone with a good reputation to take the content and launch a new server, as Spolsky himself always said should happen when SO one day jumps the shark.

Maybe people (Spolsky, others) want to work on other things? Or retire? Or focus on family? Or angel invest?

So they find a buyer for the business, transition things, cash out and go find something else to do.

I think he was very clear about the reasons why he is looking for a new CEO, in his blog post announcing that search.

The investors set a goal and Joel executed it.

I'm shocked that people continue to be shocked that this happens under Capitalism.

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