Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.
Got the offer, turned it down because of that.
The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.
Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble.
That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.
There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.
Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.
Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.
And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.
The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.
Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.
We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
That's interesting to hear.
My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.
Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.
Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.
The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.
But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.