Tapulous Cofounder Mike Lee Ejected From Company | Hacker News Reader

Tapulous Cofounder Mike Lee Ejected From Company

techcrunch.com

20 pointststegart10 comments

This story makes me really sad because not only do I know one of the Tapulous employees, but also Tapulous really showed a lot of promise with twinkle and tap tap revenge.

I personally can't wait to see what Mike and the employees at Tapulous close to him are going to do next..the rest of the company not so much. I didn't really like some of them when I met them at WWDC.

"Lee says he was brought on as an ex-Delicious Monster employee, and was planning to create the type of full featured and well designed app that Delicious is associated with. Conversely, he says that CEO Bart Decrem is trying to steer the company’s apps into the same vein as Slide or RockYou, with a large number of flashy and fun apps that aren’t particularly useful."

That's ironic, as much as I love Delicious Library I would have described Delicious Monster as a company that creates a small number (one, to be exact) of flashy and fun apps that aren’t particularly useful.

I am wondering if there are any companies that have a CEO that was brought in from the outside not actually kill the company they are running.

There seems to be a theme:

1. Outside CEO comes in, clashes with founding members

2. Founding members start leaving

3. CEO doesn't bring in any "rockstar" developers, works with who is left.

4. Company starts running out of money

5. New outside CEO comes in

6. Company sold for pennies on the dollar to large tech company, praised as big success.

Here's one counterexample:

6. Original company buys founder's new company, reinstates founder as CEO, becomes big success.

if there are any companies that have a CEO that was brought in from the outside not actually kill the company

Here's another example:

Big U.S. automaker going down the tank fast. This company hires former president from rival automaker, who was fired by the rival's chairman. Big U.S. automaker comes back from the brink of bankruptcy to be a market leader.

"Big, established, but failing company hires outsider CEO to turn company around" seems to be a different pattern (and one with a better track record - Lou Gerstner at IBM also comes to mind) compared to "young company takes large investment, has outsider CEO installed as adult supervision by investors", which pattern seems to often lead to trouble.

Google comes to mind as a company that's well known for beating the curse of the investor-installed CEO; they did so by having the founders carefully vet the potential outsiders. Unfortunately this takes time so if you are running out of runway and need that investment in order to reach V2_min, you perhaps don't have that luxury.

Plenty. The problem isn't so much hiring the outside CEO as hiring the right outside CEO.

Google?

Oh man, this sucks. I've been reading Mike's blog for a while now. He seems like a super smart and insightful guy, and his passion and attention to detail really rubs off in his writing.

I'm sure he'll be kicking ass again soon. :)

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