Color CEO Bill Nguyen Checks Out Of Day-To-Day Operations | Hacker News Reader

Color CEO Bill Nguyen Checks Out Of Day-To-Day Operations

techcrunch.com

107 pointsolivercameron60 comments

Can you imagine any other CEO of a company doing this? His behavior is bizarre and confusing. Imagine Tim Cook's email to his employees:

From: Tim Cook, Apple's CEO To: Apple Employees Re: Maps and... stuff..

Hi everyone,

As you know, I haven't been at work the past few months. What have I been doing? Well, "What haven't I been doing?" is the better question! I've taken the jet to Fiji, hiked Kilimanjaro, and eaten just the best crème brûlée at this little place off of the Champs-Élysées.

This is what I do when I know a project is a complete disaster, which happens often. I do this all the time. I just travel around. Drink a lot of beer, smoke a lot of pot. It's no big deal; nothing new or exciting.

You'd think the board would've fired my ass a long time ago, but nah - I've made sure to stack the deck with my buddies and we've got enough cash to flounder around for a while. The CEO checks keep coming, and I keep cashing them, so I'll keep the title warm.

Since iOS6 release, the Maps app has gotten a lot of criticism. In response, I've decided to go to Hawaii. To recharge my batteries. Yeah, they were pretty well charged from my last two months' off but you have no idea how draining it was to write this letter. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that.

I think I need another couple of months to recover. If some of you quit because of my irresponsible and downright bizarre behavior, I totally understand. To the rest of you, though, expect a pivot. Or something.

Aloha,

Tim

> Since iOS6 release, the Maps app has gotten a lot of criticism. In response, I've decided to go to Hawaii.

"Unfortunately, I used Apple Maps, and ended up in West Virginia."

Best HN comment all week! Thanks for giving me a smile.

I'm not sure if you didn't read to the end, but he's clearly been removed, despite lukewarm protests to the contrary. "I'm not sure what they're doing [...] but if I was there I'd [...]". I'm reading between the lines here, but he's not showing up at his next board meeting because they told him not to - he probably expects to be formally ousted and for whatever reason isn't planning on fighting it.

Please leave the asinine BS out of this forum. One of the things that sets the conversations here apart from run of the mill news sites is the civil tone. Note that it's very possible that the guy you're making fun of is reading what you write, and one of the guidelines is, "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

Projects fail. I would be exceedingly surprised if Bill takes the current state of affairs lightly and would even expect that his absence is only nominally his choice. Do you really want people lining up to mock you the next time you invest a chunk of your life into a project and it goes south? The guy is already rich from previous massive successes; the CEO checks that you mention won't contribute significantly to his net worth.

Maybe I'm just an asshole, but if I were involved in Color and my CEO has been vacationing for two months while we struggle with product failure... I'd say something fairly similar to his face (if he showed his face in the office, anyhow).

> "Do you really want people lining up to mock you the next time you invest a chunk of your life into a project and it goes south?"

Nobody is picking on him because of Color's product failure. Not even the TechCrunch article. People are picking on him because he's vacationing while his company flounders.

I don't know enough about this guy's life to tell whether or not this is the right call for him personally, but I don't think it takes a rocket surgeon to figure that this is really bad for the company and its employees.

Your comment assumes he's actually just on vacation and not that he was forced (or significantly nudged) out. I'd put my money on the latter. That he wrote a mail saying, "Everything's fine, this is totally normal..." in a time of (probable) crisis speaks very little to actual structure of events.

So we should be second guessing his own quotes (assuming they're accurate)? "I do this historically. I take off for a little while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting,"

From my point of view, a guy who's not been in the office for two months, who takes a phone call from a journalist while boarding a plane to Maui, doesn't sound like he's being 'forced' to do anything.

I empathize with your concern about the tone. Without trying to dispute your feelings (which are yours and I respect that), I'd just like to point out some considerations that may or may not make any particular comment an exception to the rule:

1. There is a difference between being uncivil to a fellow HNer in a comment thread and being uncivil to a third party that is the subject of a post.

2. There is a difference between kicking a dog when it is down and kicking a giant that topples.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billnguyen

2. I don't really mind poking fun at projects, but poking fun at people, especially when they're probably feeling shitty about things, in a place that they're likely to read it, just seems nasty to me and exactly the sort of thing that doesn't belong on HN.

The account you link to was created 21 days ago and has 3 karma. Granted, anyone can read without needing an account but it doesn't really lend weight to what (I think) you're trying to point out.

Also, the post you've taken issue with is simply a parody (or satire). There very little in there that seems like a personal attack (at least to me).

I wasn't speaking to whether he is an HN reader but rather to whether a particular comment is an uncivil reply to another Hn reader.

As in the difference between "This post shows that raganwald is an ass" and "Raganwald, you are an ass."

1. There's no indication that account belongs to the Bill Nguyen in question. Nguyen in one of the most common surnames in the world, and Bill is an exceedingly common first name.

Actually I thought the parent was a very witty and relevant comment. It's seems absurd that the CEO would just take off and vacation in Tahoe and Hawaii for MONTHS while his company is completely failing from pretty much any perspective.

He says, man if I was there we'd be pivoting. Well, you're the CEO, get your ass in the office and pivot. If he's been forced out, then say that. Fire him and get a new CEO. Maybe this is a problem with Color's board, maybe it's a problem with the CEO, but you can be damn sure this is a problem for Color. It needs a CEO, and he needs to be actively leading the company.

I would hope that Tim Cook has a sense of humor about things as well as a sense of perspective about life. As such, you need to be able to laugh at yourself (sometimes) and you certainly need to separate a problem like this from your general happiness. The parent-poster could very well become "FakeTimCook" (tm).

As for Bill Nguyen, my impression is that he's become a bit too comfortable with failure, but you're right ... we don't really know what's up based on the fluff piece we read.

There's no rule against snark here, so long as it is snark of interest to an intelligent hacker.

Awesome. Please make a Twitter account and write more of these, you have a gift :)

“I do this historically. I take off for a little while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting,” he said. “The roles of founders and CEOs is to get everyone engaged and give opportunities to people. And when things haven’t worked out as expected, the best way for me to recharge is to go on sabbatical.”

The only similar situation I can recall is Michael Arrington taking a break in 2009 after someone spat in his face at a conference:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/28/some-things-need-to-change/

The spitting incident was the last straw. I believe Arrington was truly burnt out from working like a dog for four years, and putting up with a lot of other stressful situations (Crunchpad, legal threats, etc.). And, to his credit, he came back after a month or so. It's also worth noting that he had a CEO (Heather Harde, who joined TechCrunch in 2006) still running the business.

As for Color, you can imagine what would happen if a CEO at practically any other company in a similar situation (major product failure, staff bailing, impending pivot) took off on an indefinite sabbatical for months. He or she would be out.

Based solely on what's in this article (perhaps reality is different), this reinforces my inkling that people get truly rich from mostly just two things: who you know, and marketing. Market yourself (or your product) well and know the right people, and you too can be the CEO of a vaporware company funded with more money than most people will see in their entire lives, while spending your months on sabbatical in Tahoe and Hawaii. Unbelievable. On the other hand, this is Techcrunch, and the reality is undoubtedly a little more nuanced than what's presented here.

You're right, the reality is far more nuanced than what's presented here. Setting aside the current Color fiasco, Bill Nguyen is a highly accomplished entrepreneur with close to $1B worth of startup exits in his past [1][2]. To say that he's gotten rich from "who he knows", and "marketing" is spitting in the face to a guy who's built real genuine successes from scratch, when he was a nobody. He is not making off like a bandit with the current $41M investment. This is turning out to be a failure from which he will not benefit financially in any significant way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen [2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-boy-bubble

Is this wiki page for real?

"He grew up in Houston, the son of Vietnamese immigrants whom he says he consistently disappointed. They wanted him to score A's. Instead, he scored an unpredictable mix of A's and F's, and earned a 1.4 grade point average in his senior year. He was easily distracted and confused."

Pretty much sums it up.

I don't have a lot of faith in lionized history.

Before founding SEVEN, Mr. Nguyen founded Onebox.com in 1999. It was acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com (now part of Openwave)

-- Product of the bubble 1.0

http://investor.openwave.com/stocklookup.cfm?historic_Month=...

From 200 $358=> to $2 Today, so 2/358*850= $4.75million is the realized value of his company?

Sobriety and hindsight are sometimes clarifying.

>Based solely on what's in this article (perhaps reality is different), this reinforces my inkling that people get truly rich from mostly just two things: who you know, and marketing.

You're forgetting the most important one - already being rich, especially if it was through past entrepreneurial successes as in Bill's case [1].

[1]: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bill-nguyen

must be nice!

It's strange to me that most of the talk around Color is focused around the founders and not the investors. The investors are a much more interesting subject. I mean, there are always going to be people willing to accept 40 million without a real product, heck I'm probably one of them, but I'd like to see interviews with the people who thought it was a good idea to give a company at that stage much money. I'm much more interested in hearing from them.

That would be interesting, but I doubt it will ever happen. Nobody with any interest in participating in the VC-funded ecosystem (which includes much of the tech media, sadly) is ever going to point at one of the investors who fund that ecosystem and publicly call them out as a sucker.

Even if they, you know, are a sucker.

You say that now with the hindsight of LinkedIn's IPO, Facebook's post-IPO struggles, Twitter's struggling to monetize, but in the time period when Color was raising funds was late 2010 / early 2011 when we were at the height of the social mobile apps bubble.

I'd guess that the risk of losing 40 million was worth it, in this case. And that's probably not a lot of money to stump up, for some people/groups.

Another valid title could be "Interview with Irresponsible Aloof CEO who lives in Bizarroland."

If there was any explanation of why Color is a giant smoldering pile of failure this article encapsulates it pretty well.

I'd put particularly salient quotes from the article here but they're all fine examples that could be used as chapter headers in a book called "How Not to CEO (or wasting other people's money because YOLO)"

Some people may think your post is a little over the top, but I agree 100%, and I would have used the same tone

Bill Nguyen is very overrated, and apparently he specializes in "exits", getting te startup to a point barely enough over the threshold of getting a buyer (surely one that's not an expert) and selling.

Maybe he was too aloof, or maybe not, we don't know. But what we do know is that most startups fail. I think you're being overly harsh.

I don't disagree with your central point (most startups fail). But my personal opinion is that it is the epitomy of unprofessionalism to "go on sabbatical" when you are the CEO and your company is literally melting down around you.

At his point it the decision should come down to "how do I right this ship?" or "should I turn over the helm?" not "should I go to Maui, Tahoe or both?" His responses show such an unbelievable detachment from the investment made in the company, the employees, the technology and anything else that's going on around him.

"I do this historically. I take off for a little while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting."

Imagine the CEO of any company, after having some disasterous lauches and really really struggling to find a direction and needing somebody at the helm more than ever, just up and disappearing for a couple of months, nobody really knows exactly where he is or how to get ahold of him. Banging around Monte Carlo or the Maldives or the Alps. And when somebody finally gets ahold of him to find out his opinion on why the dev team up and left, why the product and company are failing and what he's going to do to fix things comes back with this pile of nonsense.

"I feel bad about it, I can see why people would leave, you know with everything we've ever done being a giant failure and then with me up and disappearing for who knows how long, if I was back at the office I'd probably pivot, maybe, but I'm not there, maybe I'll feel like figuring something to do with the money we have left in the bank when I finish parasailing, maybe whatever, it's not like I don't have a habit of just up and disappearing like this, the board knows this about me. We'll chat when I get back from Snowboarding in the Alps."

Most startups fail for a variety of reasons, lack of experience, funding, mistargeting the market, etc. Most startups don't fail because the CEO took his money and ran off to a tropical paradise "to vacation" while the house was on fire.

Most startups that fail don't materialize out of thin air, raise $40M, and fail within a year and a half. I think it's impossible to be too harsh on anybody involved with Color.

Harsh? Taking a CEO paycheck and disappearing for two months while your company crumbles, while maintianing an attitude of "So what? The rest of the team needs to show up for work but I'm special and need a two month sabbatical"... borders on embezzlement.

According to several sources close to the company, Nguyen has not been seen at Color’s Palo Alto headquarters for more than two months. The speculation was that Nguyen was “probably either in Tahoe or Hawaii.”

And then a little further down...

We’re told the changes have come after a power struggle between members of Color’s board — some of whom are loyal to Nguyen, and others who were anxious for a change.

The guy hasn't even shown up for work in two months, and there are still board members who are loyal to him? He must have some pretty awesome blackmail material on them.

I can see someone checking out to a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat to think about where to take the company, but to go hang out in Maui for two months is beyond inexcusable. There is no insight he's earning on day 60 that he couldn't have gotten on day 10.

That or maybe the board members are his relatives?

If you recall the discussion we were having about really stressful situations, and the way people react. One is to become a tiger and fight, the other is to flee.

It is important to realize that this is not necessarily a conscious choice, you learn a lot about yourself when you get tested like this, you can see it in people experiencing a disaster like Katrina, when it finally sinks in that this may be the last few days of their lives. That level of stress flips the switch and blam! there you are either fighting or running.

Time to move the CEO into a different role, one which takes advantage of the charisma and energy and vision, but one that does not involve being ultimately responsible.

I do remember this. I wonder if Nguyen has never encountered a failure before? He's apparantely a successful early-stage startup CEO. Has everything he's worked on worked out?

"I don’t think there is a pivot happening now at all, but if I were there we would pivot."

Hey man, if you're the CEO and they aren't pursuing the right strategy, then get your ass back there and do your job. If you don't feel like doing your job, then resign and let the board find someone who is at least going to try to accomplish something.

This reads like an article on the Onion. Unbelievable.

Just some historical context: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/bill-nguyen-startups (HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229299)

That was about half a year after Color got funded with $41 million.

When Color where all the rage in the tech circles a year ago, weren't they represented as the epitome of "invest in talent over the product", with Mr. Nguyen as the star?

Where does that leave them?

Color was a great idea, far beyond any social network. The concept of an elastic network which cannot be influenced, where you cannot friend or unfriend people and where a system decides who is your friend was just awesome. Adding friends or contacts manually is so 2005.

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. The bit "[a network] where a system decides who is your friend was just awesome" could easily go either way.

Did you actually find out interesting things from its statements as to who your friends were, or do you not like the idea (it doesn't sound particularly appealing to me)?

It is basically a chatroulette for mobile photos, with the additional creepiness factor of knowing that the people on the app are some where nearby.

I agree, it was an idea ahead of it's time that if caught on, would have completely changed the concept of social networks. It was a big bet and high risk so I'm not surprised it hasn't caught on. The concepts and thinking behind the idea, in my opinion, was rock solid and more true to how real networks work. I might have even have tried to redefine it as the "experience network" where you can look at shared experiences from many different viewpoints.

An elastic social network to share photos with people at the same event in real-time?

Sounds about as ingenious as a social network around credit card transactions. Oh.

Boy, I sure wish I could get paid to travel while not having to deliver any results of any kind. Must be nice!

What does color make these days?

Not money.

Except lots of it for their CEO to pay for his vacation.

A lot of commenters here are mentioning Nguyen is pulling in a "CEO Salary". Does anyone actually know this? As a founder CEO with a lot of personal cash in the bank, I would assume he is taking little to no salary. Not that this makes up for his absence in a time of need, but just sayin'. . .

Wait, what day to day operations?

Every time I go on Color webpage, they have a completely different product under same name. I feel sorry for people getting tricked with ridiculous pivot attempts.

Have you ever listened to this guy? He's completely full of it; one line of BS after another. It's not even worth hearing what he has to say.

Rumor has it the guy is broke---his house in Hawaii is for rent and he rushed out of his house in Palo Alto like it was being foreclosed on--- So he is likely using the "vacation" time to return to his roots---the trailer parks of Houston. You BS and lie your way thru Silicon Valley until eventually you end up right back where you came from---someone should do a "rags to riches to rags" story

This all seems a little too hard to believe. I'm not really confident that the CEO has been smoking pot and drinking beer in Tahoe and Hawaii for the past two months. When software companies start to fail, the engineers know it. I wouldn't be surprised if they just talked to some pissed off engineers and weren't really getting the straight dope.

lol.

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