What Happened to Treehouse?
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He could have handed the reigns over to someone else. He could have sold for a lower price- there's always someone willing to buy if you go low enough. He could have pivoted the company to doing something he was more excited about. He could have done anything.
But the most important thing he could have done was be transparent and open with the people his decisions would impact. Being a leader means you stand there and deliver the bad news, and take the heat from people mad at you. Dropping a bomb and then hiding to avoid the flak for it is a cowardly move.
Adding "Ryan Carson" to the list of leaders I don't want to work for in the future.
How on earth is sexual harassment a risk to an acquisition?
On a side note, without knowing the details, its a bit unfair to lay all this at the CEOs door step. It very well could be he was given the boot, and as part of his exit, he is given severance with a non-disclosure agreement.
Sells his house, buys a boat, and walks away, it seems more like he was pushed than it would be, I just got tired of dealing with it.
Wouldn't be the first time a CEO got ousted because of a failed acquisition.
I have no knowledge of him, or who he is as a person, just saying we don't know the current narrative is accurate.
Apparently."
"Carson sold a mansion for over $3.2 million, and bought a boat, but couldn’t afford to pay severance to his employees?
Apparently."
I haven't had a chance to look into how Treehouse started. However, a CEO's role is not to fund a company with their personal finances. If the CEO bought a boat with company funds, or received windfall bonus, that would be an issue. While these are examples of tone deaf behavior from this CEO, I don't understand why these questions are being harped on like this.
It really sounds like this CEO just checked out. Sounds like the board should have stepped in and either replaced him for being an ineffective steward of the company. Which just goes to show that the CEO has fault, but there are others that were asleep at the wheel as well.
In my entire career the highest paid people in a private company (including multiple high growth B2B startups) has always been the top sales people. Not the sales manager, not the CEO, an individual contributor Sales person. As you hit more and more above quota, accelerators kick in where you commission percentage increases massively. And our CEO loves writing them those checks because good sales people way more than pay for themselves.
The boat may of been bought from the appreciation of the home.
I mean.. that's capitalism? Capital accumulation is the bedrock of the system.
a. having enough capital in the business to pay severance, or, b. firing people at the point before they stopped being able to avoid severance.
... are both better options than he should have taken.
> Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster
These people will never experience happiness and high morale
I get it. People are pissed off about not having a job and the no severance is just salt in the wound. Lashing out at the CEO is obvious and justifiable. Stretching that ire into the CEOs personal finance is not serving the cause in a meaningful way. Absolutely, bitch&moan about his Insta posts. Bitch&moan about the fact the CEO wasn't willing to sacrifice some salary as a gesture to offset. Lots of examples of how badly this CEO handled this. Definitely will not look good in his future CEO job interviews.
When you're buying a boat and spending all your time sailing as you are supposed to be putting together a deal to save the company, and then that deal falls through, people are going to wonder if maybe there was more you could have done if you hadn't been buying boats and playing.
This putz was too cowardly to lead honestly, and too incompetent to get a deal done to protect the livelihood of his team. If he knew he was checked out, he could have explored restructuring and letting the team buy in, maybe allowed them to reach out to their network and replace him. Instead all those hours of effort were reduced to nothing while he ran away from his responsibilities.
Fuck people like that, and fuck their boats and their Instagram feeds. They steal time away from our families for no benefit to us our society at large.
If you as a CEO feel burnt out etc and can't be bothered anymore to run the company and can't find a buyer, but the folks who joined your company are still invested because they believe in the vision, then let them buy the company from you. I'm sure some arrangement could have been made, even if you're not getting the millions you were expecting.
At least you'd protect your personal brand when you go and do your next venture.
But the way Ryan handled this is really poor - especially those sailing boat shots, while his employees had to worry about finding the next job.
Poor leadership and he totally burnt his personal brand imo.
Edit: typos / clarity
Live in modest house and give the people who sacrificed for you like a week of severance or something. Anything.
What the attempts at building a norm along the lines of, "It isn't a crime, so people shouldn't talk about his finances" is about attempting to keep people from noticing that is almost always the case. It is class-defense, and what won't look good in future CEO interviews is that he was gauche-enough to draw attention to the difference between incentives-in-theory and the real world.
Yes, employees of a tech startup are probably compensated pretty well and have great job prospects. However, their wealth is probably negligible compared to the CEO, despite them appearing to care much more about their work than the CEO does. I understand that most people will say that this is fair and the market has determined their worth, but even if that's true the people who get the short end will resent it and see that they have more to gain by toppling the system than by working inside it. Wealth Inequality is an existential threat to western capitalist democracy, and if it's not rectified it will lead to revolution. If you are in favor of our current system and wish to preserve it, wealth inequality must be addressed.
> pay severance to his employees?
Isn't severance pay something that should be included in the work contract? I don't know how this differs in the US.
Normally when you get severance, it's in exchange for liability from lawsuits and to prevent bad press and sharing of trade secrets. What this does is make it much harder to sell Treehouse since there's now a fair amount of liability attached.
Maybe he’s neck deep in debt? Maybe he spent all his money on a boat assuming a windfall would come that never came. There can be any number of reasons someone would sell their house as their company goes under.
Seems pretty clear he was fully planing on the acquisition to go through. Which may be haphazard, but happens.
The most likely answer to, “Why did he fire everyone instantly with no severance?” is “Because there is no money.” It seems very likely after the acquisition fell through there was simply nothing left.
I'm not excusing CEO's behavior. It was 100% poorly managed. However, it is a learnable lesson for others that could be in this position. This is a forum full of startups or hopefuls. Not all startups will succeed. There are tough decisions to be made. Nobody will be happy about potential loss of their job. There's always the decision to keep people informed with the potential of panic ship jumping vs going all in on a bet of selling the company.
Not saying he should be funding anything w/ personal money but he sold at a substantial profit to what he bought it at.
I’d take no severance over some guy having to sacrifice his or his family’s livelihood so that he can provide 10 people with parachutes.
Another case totally of course if that mansion was bought with company funds. In that case it’s fraud and charges.
I look at startup employees as being very similar to investors; instead of investing money, you invest time. Most startup investments fail; the investors lose everything. You have to know that going in.
Nitpicking the instagram posts also seems pretty petty. We're criticizing the CEO for spending time with his family and walking around in the rain? People do stuff outside of work, even though there's work that they could theoretically be doing. Most people consider that healthy, and even CEOs that failed badly still deserve some recreational time. (It would be pretty cringey if the CEO looked up your Instagram account and posted a blog post like "why are you visiting your parents when there's still bugs open against your component!", right?)
(I take particular exception to the "Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster (#hurricanehenri) two days after announcing a severe reduction in force" caption. It's not like he willed the hurricane into existence, or could do anything to stop it. Why are we mad at him for climate change and random natural disasters? The dude is bad at being a CEO, but he's not God!)
But I strongly agree with you on the metrics thing. Sure, all those feel-good internal metrics are important, but if your subscription business has fewer subscribers this month than last then that's bad news. Complaining that "keeping the company solvent" was the CEO's main focus is a weird thing to complain about.
I work at a startup, and most of our code is open source. That makes the job more enjoyable, but I also realize it comes with a risk. Someone could just read the code, take the best parts, and sell and market it better than us. That's a risk that you just have to live with. And, I can personally mitigate some of the risks -- keep my technical skills sharp, save money, etc.
I empathize with the people that lost their job; it's a huge disruption and their lives will never be the same. But I think it's unfair to blame the CEO for climate change because he enjoyed going for a walk in the rain. It's not related in any way.
If you want to be mad about climate change, or economic inequality, or the lack of social safety nets in the USA, that's reasonable, but I'm not really sure that it's fair to pin this on Carson.
What I saw was poor leadership and straight-up callousness. Failing to communicate with affected employees is one thing. Ducking under the cover of 'Google algo killed us' is convenient. But holding off on a formal announcement until the last working week is pure cowardice.
1. It's just my opinion, by I find things like this always reflect incredibly poorly on the author, especially since the author appears somewhat clueless as to why someone would think it would show them in a bad light. It would be one thing if there were some egregiously bad behavior (e.g. stories of Adam Neumann come to mind, as do the recent articles about Ozy Media leadership). But this basically just comes off as a bitch session: the CEO is rich, he did a bad job announcing the layoffs, we got no severance, etc. etc. When that happens, you say "fuck that guy" and move on. Nobody really cares about your laundry list of slights.
2. Now, all that said, I normally only see missives like this where leadership tries to build a false emotional bond with employees: "We're a mission-driven company, we're changing the world, we treat each other like family, yada yada." So some (usually less experienced, less jaded employees) take this message to heart and truly do form an emotional bond with the company, so when business conditions change and there are layoffs, they take it incredibly personally. Thus, my point is really that leadership only has themselves to blame when they cultivate a "we're a big family" vibe and then are surprised when people are extra pissed that their "family members" are kicking them to the curb.
Just a bit of advice: treat your employment like business, because that's what it is. You can work hard and take pride in your work, but also understand that you might get cut if the business need arises. Getting laid off always sucks, but I think it's easier to do if you have a healthy detachment from work.
If the author was actually trying to do something with this post (e.g. expose criminal behavior as the recent Ozy Media articles have done, or expose a broken, misogynistic culture in hope of affecting some change like Susan Fowler's post on Uber did), I could understand. But this just seems to be a pissed employee who wants to vent - which I understand, I just don't understand what he wishes to accomplish with this public bitch list.
Ironic considering the comments that follow. Like
> basically just comes off as a bitch session
I do think your points could have merit but you’re articulating them in a rude way that detracts from your argument.
Yes, the love bombing approach to corporate culture in trendy tech startups is a nasty manipulation technique we should all watch out for, but we should also have some respect and compassion for employees that buy into it and get their hearts broken. Should they have known better? Yes. Is this not that bad in the grand scheme of things? Probably. But comments like this don’t help.
Just a bit of (unsolicited) advice: articulate criticism respectfully with empathy for the criticized. It will make your arguments much more effective.
The "love bombing" doesn't help, but, of course, they are hiring and retention techniques. I think it is similar to an ideological propaganda that has led to wars. Whether you accept the 'mission' or not, you're out of control in the end unless you are the leadership. When this stuff does come up, at best, all I can do is ignore it, particularly aware of the fact that I worked at a company for a long time, like my current employment and surviving a layoff, company restructures, etc.
Maturing from "my co-workers are my family and we are doing great things" to just seeing it as a job is probably the best thing to do. I hope that instead of raging against this CEO, upset employees instead receive both gainful employment again and a sense that a company is just a company.
He'd already had success as an entrepreneur, he never needed to ever work again. Yet he challenged himself to build something much bigger that stood a chance to change the world. Sometimes it just doesn't work out.
His actions at the end indicate to me that he was just burned out. But in my opinion he should have announced the firings himself no matter how painful and quit a few months earlier when he could have paid severance, no excuse for that.
(Note: i dont know whether Carson was normally nice and competent, but this article itself describes Treehouse as a great place to work and toxic asshole CEOs don't usually build such places. So I'm really just extrapolating from there)
Treehouse was the first online resouce that made programming "click" for me almost 10 years ago when I started thinking about changing careers.
I absolutely loved their short, fun videos followed by quick quizzes and programming challenges. I basically completed everything they had for Ruby, Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS back in the day.
Unfortunately they didn't keep up the pace with interesting classes, and I would come back after a few years and resubscribe to see mostly the same courses, just re-shot.
I was still recommending Treehouse for people completely new to programming, though.
It is a dire scenario, but I hope they can bounce back from this.
Also a person from another screenshot wanted "safe space" in work Slack.
As for the employee who was asking for a safe space to gather with other employees who are being fired on such short notice and without severance, that’s a reasonable request.
Sure. It implies his success is because of his race. It also implies his bad behavior is because of his race. Both of these statements ignore his agency and individuality, and suggest white people are, as a group, poorly behaved and undeserving of the success they work for.
Attributing negative stereotypes to people based on group characteristics is bigotry, and doing so based on race is racism.
Imagine it were attributing his succeed to being jewish, or his bad behavior to being black. It should be pretty obvious that those would be socially unacceptable. The fact that it's currently popular among some groups to hate white people doesn't make it any less racist.
Agreed. I also agree that the comment can point out privilege. I do think more often than not when people say "white tech dude" they mean it in a negative way, implying that all white guys in tech are the same and bad. Do you ever see this phrase in a more positive light?
> more often that not when people say “white tech dude” they mean it in a negative way, implying that all white guys in tech are the same and bad
This is why we’re talking about the specific tweet in the article and not other uses of “white tech bro” that we cannot account for. Context matters. The usage of “white tech bro” here was referring to the archetype of straight white American male in a position of power, which actually comprises majority of people in power in America, which is a long shot from “all white guys in tech are the same and bad”. It’s really just pointing to the privilege and you’re infusing a far-fetched racist connotation to it.
That's not racism.
It may be describing (either simple or structural) racism as a contributing factor, but acknowledging racism isn't racist.
It is a position that suffers no backlash or threats of job loss or cancelling in contrast to anything similar for other identity groups. Similar, industry conferences and hiring practices etc can even explicitly single out and promote favoring other identity groups ("women/minorities who code", explicit racial hiring quotas etc) but could never in a million years pursue similar efforts for white men.
Major yikes on this. I never thought about how online learning platforms have this kind of misaligned incentive.
A customer who had been using an online dating service for many years is presumably a great revenue source but a bad experience for people they are matched with!
The result of this is that online dating becomes mostly about new user acquisition - you've got to keep new people coming in to keep the service useful.
Seriously though, this is not a misaligned incentive. Some business simply can't realistically be based on a model of perpetual customers.
Treehouse isn't nearly as expensive as degree programs from DeVry and others, so it's not quite as ominous.
Who knows what he walked away with after he’d sold his house and cleared the mortgage. Presumably he needs to buy another house afterwards. Either way it doesn’t matter in the slightest because that’s not related to the business. What sense would it make to invest personal funds in a failing business? How much of a dent would it have even made with 45 full time employees?
The production quality of the videos at Treehouse is high, but the quality of the instruction varies by teacher.
The link below is to a small, but helpful, YouTube channel called Tech Course Review. It reviews online learning platforms (Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) and has an informative review of Treehouse from December 2020:
Treehouse Review 2021: Is Treehouse worth it?
How the fuck does this author know this? The boss could have spoken to any number of employees with the author being none the wiser. FAQ my arse -- this is a whinge from a disgruntled former employee...
Don't get me wrong, the CEO of this place was probably not the nicest guy, but this is clearly loaded a certain way. The use of the word "never" instead of just plain-vanilla "no" is also a bit of a give-away.
This is all really shitty - startups fail, and companies wind down, sure. And I get this is only one side of the story but it really sounds like the founder got his and didn't give a shit about anyone else. That's pretty much textbook how not to do it. But hey, at least he has a boat and a smarmy instagram account!
But the CEO always seemed... weird. I remember he appeared randomly in one video, seemed obvious he had forced it.
Also looks as though the CEO "removed management" in 2013. As in get rid of all the manager roles. Also seems people didn't work Fridays (in other words had a 4 day a week).
It would be interesting to me to learn if any of these things were the reason for the decline of TreeHouse.
I don't know if you are reading this, Andrew Chalkley and others, but thank you for making such lovely courses. I hope you find or have found something better out there!
Sure, the boat and the house stuff are not really things that should put the CEO in bad light, that much we can all agree on.
Though I must say, if you're a CEO and you make such an effort to showcase every good thing going on in your life on Instagram, while you are firing 90% of your employees, that's just bad optics. I know I would be mad.
Secondly, another mistake the CEO did here is to not set the right expectations. How does "money runs out by November 2022" equate to "you're being fired this September"? It's an asshole move not to let your staff know that if the deal doesn't go through, layoffs are imminent.
Also, the comment about the CEO reaching out privately to people being fired -- I mean, wow. How low can you go? I have never been the company and CEO worshipping kind of guy, but I have mad respect for my CEO because he has constantly proven to be someone who cares about employees. Whereas this guy even lies to the media about something that can be easily disproven.
> August 25: Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster (#hurricanehenri) two days after announcing a severe reduction in force
What an absurd, petty reach. As though hurricanes haven’t been happening since prehistory. The CEO in question may be terrible, but this author has lost all credibility in my eyes.