Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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I'm trying to find the part that should outrage me and I'm not finding it. Startups fail. You can make up whatever internal metrics you want ("graduation rate" "are students happy?") but at the end of the day, revenue needs to be greater than expenses. If they lose money making students happy, that's a charity, not a business. If they structured the organization as a business, then that's an existential problem.

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!)

Is a company that's been going for 10 years still a startup? Perhaps it's just me, but I just wouldn't assume that joining a 10 year old company (especially one that had essentially been spun out of a another venture, Think Vitamin) was a risky venture in the silicon valley startup kind of a way?

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 have to agree with this. On the basis of results, I'm not sure that this person was a particularly good CEO or leader, but I'm also not sure that I'm qualified to make that judgment.

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.

Maybe it's because you're looking for 'outrage' in the first place.

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.

Move along then, the blogpost is meant for regular humans who might actually feel outraged when their seemingly-stable employer (at least through Nov 2022) suddenly decides they don't feel like running the company anymore and burns it to the ground

You have to understand that there is some risk working on social causes versus turning the gears of a money machine. If there weren't any risk, everyone would be working on online learning or curing cancer instead of figuring out how to shave off a nanosecond in an automated trading system or getting newspaper readers to click one more ad.

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.

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