What every founder fears
medium.com
medium.com
Honestly, this whole situation shows that all three of these people don't know how to interact socially, like for real, with other people. I'm saying "for real" because it seems their social perspectives are heavily skewed inward and towards themselves.
Also, it's super odd because towards the end of the post, the lines get blurred; she seems to be equating her husband's success with her own. She had literally zero to do with the success of Github.
She seems to vaguely admit fucking up, but that any sort of passionate founder eventually leaves to work on something new and exciting anyways, or that "even when their company was at the height of success [...] they try their hands at something different". I think that's total bs, and that it's certainly not necessary to plug the name of your charity 3 times in this post, because this whole situation has nothing to do with your charity.
Not criticizing. Just sharing my own mixed feelings.
On the article though, the aristocrat-wannabee pseudo-fears of "being misunderstood in their motivations as their companies grow", is ridiculous compared to the employees' fears: wasting their one life, humiliation, unemployment, impostor syndrome, abuse, etc.
No, it is not - it is rather that you fear it's the case. It's no wonder given the growing emphasis on PC in recent years. Compare the OpenSSL/OpenBSD affair - nobody gave a true shit about attitudes years ago; whereas todays some harsh git commentaries generates a multitude of comments on many blogs; spawns two to three camps sometimes creating cute flamewars and a wikipedia section "Controversies" on an individual's article. And gender didn't even come into play.
Then again, I don't know all of the commentaries on that piece.
In fact, your post comes off as arrogant and immature. For example, you say "She had literally zero to do with the success of Github." I dont know how many relationships you've been in, but women I have dated have helped me keep my sanity and my happiness while doing difficult things. That in and of itself has helped me do better and therefore increased the chance of success of whatever I have been working on. There are also many historical examples of this effect at work. In short, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
> Honestly, this whole situation shows that all three of these people don't know how to interact socially, like for real, with other people.
I my opinion, the whole affair, and a whole another in the IT/incubator society where the average (not median) age hovers around 25, are sufficiently summarized with these words.
I'm confused. What do you find wrong with her quoting herself? If she had been quoting herself for her wisdom or wit, the way one might toss in quotes of Thomas Jefferson or Mark Twain, then yes, that would qualify as being full of herself. That's not what she was doing. The self-quoting here was part of the narrative. For instance, she wanted to write about something that someone said in answer to a question she asked. She quoted herself to tell the reader the question.
This appears to be the real reason for Tom's resignation.
I find it strange that both of the Preston-Werners posted blog posts directly after the github post came out. Usually I'd think lawyers would not encourage this...
The right to make public statements (or not) is always a heavily contested point as I personally both can and can't talk about. ;)
Most attorneys will advise clients not to make public statements until a matter has been resolved formally. Where appropriate, public statements are generally very direct and avoid detail.
I am skeptical that an attorney blessed statements like "we were fully cleared of all accusations of harassment" and "we learned that, despite, being found not guilty of the harassment accusations." These statements, particularly "found not guilty", would be appropriate following a favorable resolution of a civil or criminal matter. In my opinion they are absolutely not appropriate following the completion of a third party investigation initiated by a company. Such investigations are a standard part of the pre-litigation process; they do not eliminate the threat of litigation and they do not guarantee a successful defense.
I am even more skeptical that this statement was coordinated with counsel because it contains information that could be used to support other claims against the company. The statement gives credence to the idea that some employees may have felt pressured by a superior's spouse. There are a variety of causes of actions under which such an admission could be beneficial to a plaintiff's claims and these statements could conceivably be useful to other employees if they are considering the pursuit of unrelated actions.
It seems like defunkt may have watched mojombo and his wife do a few things that he'd rather they didn't do. Maybe he was frustrated and talked to their investor about it and they didn't like the situation either, and long story short, mojombo resigned. I imagine this might be hard for their friendship (which I hear is legendary despite their differences) but hopefully they'll overcome it.
Edit: In case you're wondering with the (rather unexpected) downvotes and all; I'm still really curious about the answer.
Totally! I mean, it's almost like they've been waiting silently for the go ahead to speak out or something!
It does not seem difficult to understand both sides in a situation like this. It seems like something that probably happens all the time, especially in regards to charities.
people need them
they also help prevent really bad situations being created (quite possibly unintentionally) when there exist power differentials
In the beginning of my career, certainly before I had the cash reserves to easily weather being laid off, I worked for a company that had a 4-month death march. The two nights before the work was due I literally didn't sleep. As an aside, I really can't recommend this; the code I produced was basically nonsensical. And I think I added far more bugs than I removed, but I did get the final blocking bug out (no matter how many every-so-slightly lower priority bugs I added in its stead.) The ceo came in the morning of the final due date and saw me -- wearing the same clothes for nearly 48 hours and utterly sleep deprived -- and made a crack about how I didn't look like I'm been working hard and I should get to work or he'd fire me. Joking about firing people may or may not ever be funny, but definitely stops being funny when the person has the ability to do it. And some managers fail to understand that - your relationships with employees change when you're their supervisor.
Similarly, it's really not hard to see how being too close or too friendly with people you supervise can cause all sorts of problems, ranging from letting them get away with things they shouldn't because of the friendship or them sharing things with you that force you, as a boss, to choose between your friendship or what your company requires.
I just don't think it's a good idea either way. It's a bummer that it makes workplaces a little more impersonal, but imo it's for the best. I bet it's the reason the military doesn't (from my perspective) seem to encourage enlisted and officers to co-socialize.
Getting it right is hard.
There's also a difference between "colleagues" and "employees" let alone "partner's employees".
Look at it like this: a student flirting with an other student[0] is generally appropriate, a teacher flirting with a student not so much. Because the teacher is in a position of abusable power compared to the student an otherwise harmless situation easily becomes fraught with peril.
[0] assuming reason, acknowledgement of rejection, etc..
From what it sounds like, the relationship between the employees/execs at Github was much more friendly than the teacher/student relationship you mentioned. The pitty is that this is super common at small companies, and it would appear this is the relevant fallout after you grow beyond a certain size.
Teachers and students can have very friendly relationships (common when the teacher is young, or in uni-level courses, I've had excellent relations with teachers in the past). That does not change the power relation and the risks of abuse thereof.
JAH is honest, and github's board decided Tom can't stay. Unfortunately, admitting that exposes them to massive legal liability (starting with the unaddressed allegation from JAH that she was penalized at work because she wouldn't fuck a coworker, and moving on to the options she was forced to give up when she left. Plus penalties. And a hostile work environment.) So this is an excuse from the board and/or ceo to get Tom + wife the hell away from github without admitting guilt.
I don't know what to believe, though I'm naturally a cynic.
My (yes, speculation; was the first line not clear enough?) was that Tom + wife did something relatively close to the claim, and therefore Tom needed to leave. This is an excuse for him to leave -- maybe the only one around -- that doesn't open github to further liability.
@abalone: one more time:
if the board where to say "found nothing" and tom 'quit', it's an admission of guilt. The board instead is saying "found nothing, but oh, here's some minor misconduct so now tom is leaving", ie not an admission of guilt with respect to Julie's allegations. Thus my guess is that Tom leaving over some charity incident is a way to (1) get tom + wife away from github without (2) either explicitly ("yup, Tom did just what she said") or implicitly ("Tom didn't do a damn thing but oh, he just up and left") admitting guilt
Now you are contradictorily saying their statement "is basically an admission of guilt".
So we agree on that. Therefore, I'm saying admitting guilt like that would not be the right move for a cynical board that just wants to minimize legal liability. Most likely the dismissal was due to other related issues that came up in the investigation concerning his handling of the situation. There's plenty potential scandal within that to be cynical about, it just doesn't support the notion that Horvath's charges about sexism necessarily have any merit.
I sincerely hope no one has to work with this personality type but I am willing to bet most everyone has seen this bad faith behavior in action. You know the office bully who, when called out for pushing a person around says in some form, "come on, can't you take a joke?" Isn't it odd how this same person never calls the thing a joke when he or she gets what is wanted out of the same behavior?
"I was totally joking when I said I needed you to work over the weekend or else. Seesch. Lighten up." I can assure you, I have never heard of a single person getting a monday apology email for putting in that weekend work from this sort of office "practical joker."
So it is not too surprising to see HR departments and lawyers finding themselves implementing "PC" policies and "buzz kill" practices as a means of mitigating these sorts of power abusive strategies since the bully is ultimately going to act the victim of misunderstood intentions when asked in any form to stop.
Isn't it odd how the biggest tragedy for this personality type is having to admit how their actions might have hurt others?
(The bigger of a celeb / more successful you become, the bigger of a target you wear on your back for people to try to tear you down.)
Neither. Arrogant it the right word. Not maliciously so, but arrogance nevertheless.
An arrogance that is far from unique in the start-up world, the arrogance to think that in spite of centuries of documented history you can create an organization that doesn't have clear formal structure and not have it end up as a cult-like snake pit.
As companies, they fail to provide the kind of safety and security people who are not entrepreneurs need, and call it "freedom". And it may feel like freedom for a while, when it's still a small group of close friends, but after that it's just a Darwinian social experiment.
And when the shit hits the fan, it doesn't matter who exactly did what. It's the arrogance and narcissism of the founders that is responsible. Founders who believe that everyone who works for them should be like them, and then everything will magically be good.
"Tom saw himself not as CEO, but as the architect of a unique business structure. He wanted to create a company where he, himself, would have loved to have been an employee."
This isn't visionary. This isn't naivety. This isn't optimism. It's narcissism.
Question though - isn't one of the points of starting your own business that you're having a hard time finding a perfect job working for someone else? Ergo, don't a lot of us "[want] to create a company where [we], [ourselves], would have loved to have been an employee."?
edit - I totally agree with the rest of your comment about arrogance.
> employees view them as disconnected and only trying to build empires of gold. Tom saw himself not as CEO, but as the architect of a unique business structure...He wanted to invest heavily in employees and to create a space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things. In our home every night, he spoke passionately about how to build a company that gave employees freedom.
Other than being a Github user and customer, I know nothing of the details of this case other than what I've read. She admits she was obtuse about "power structures" in the company, but this also is not a unique thing in Silicon Valley - she's not blind to these things in a unique way.
That said - it's like someone believing their own press releases. "A space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things". To me that sounds like saying Platt from "Twelve Years a Slave" got an excellent bag to pick cotton from, and build up the glorious plantation he was working on. Preston-Warner can snap his fingers, and someone who was getting a check to put food on the table and a roof over their head is suddenly not going to have the rent check by the end of the month. Especially when the next employer is asking for references, why you left the last job, are there any gaps in employment etc. People on an H1-B visa are dependent upon the company so they can't be thrown out of the country, so their green card application can not be restarted etc.
This is in the default structure of a corporation, and the laws, and all the default papers that super-angels and VC's put forward. Ownership and control of a corporation is 80-90% in the hands of the angels, VC's and founders. Of the scraps left over, executives and top-level experienced techs get the lion's share. This is the reality, and everyone knows it. People believing their own press releases about people building great things are delusional. It's like the Tuskeegee or Dr. Mengele subjects happy about how they are helping contribute to science. No one is fooled by this other than naive, new to the workplace, socially maladjusted programmers in their early 20's. This is why there is such a feeding frenzy over this small pool of naive young men.
Very, very unlikely. Even though employment laws are very employer-friendly in the US, from the sound of it, Tom built an inclusive, open company culture. One of the side effects of that is that if you abuse your power as a leader, you cause irreparable damage to the culture - which is not something you want to do at practically any cost after spending so much effort building the culture and getting it to stand up on its own feet.
Ricardo Semler, major shareholder and CEO of Semco, explained it like this: "I have a handgun in my desk drawer with a single bullet in it."
If he really had built the kind of culture where he could just fire people by snapping his fingers, surely the easiest thing would have been to fire the troublemaker at the first sign of trouble instead of waiting for her to resign and make a fuss.
[1] Of course, you still have to give two weeks notice if you want to exercise that at-willness for yourself!
[2] I mean, unless he "randomly" fires all the people of race X, or something like that
No, you don't.
Tom has spent considerable time (as I have, in my own company) getting people to a point where they think for themselves, make decisions as a group, and generally behave as independent adults rather than the kind of infantile employees who just do what they're told by their boss. Since the latter is the way most businesses operate, it's no mean feat to get this done with a company of a dozen, let alone with one of hundreds.
If Tom decides to arbitrarily fire someone, even just one person, without going through the group-oriented processes he's spent all this time building up, he immediately undermines all that, potentially fatally.
Since he clearly cares about the company's culture (enough to make it his priority for the last half-decade), it's very unlikely he would risk that to get rid of one person.
And finally, again, there's the evidence: if he really did want to get rid of this woman, and he could, why didn't he?
That's more speculation than evidence, surely?
That's a professional courtesy; it's almost never legally required.
"While many duties of a public relations department involve building the reputation of the employer, with damage control it is primarily about minimizing the negative perception caused by a crisis-situation. A crisis is sometimes the result of an unexpected event. It might also be about something that the public relations department hoped to conceal from the public or hoped would not happen. Those involved in damage control are typically on call 24 hours a day, ready to minimize negative public perception."
It depends on your view. Many times it's not worth commenting on, and unless you can refute it completely, it devolves into a he-said/she-said argument.
1. Don't talk about it.
2. Spin it.
3. Burn it. - Let the lesser known news sources get the scoop so the big news sources won't want it.
I think they're trying to go with 2. "This is a good thing... Oculus Rift Technology... leaving for other, more important reasons... etc..."
I would have gone with bullet 1.
That's any interesting tactic. Do you have a good example of a company "burning" bad PR?
It appears that GitHub and the Preston-Werners aren't coordinating their messages (though no doubt all counsel involved have reviewed them): the GH release is appropriately terse, giving away the bare minimum of information in order to minimize both PR and legal exposure, while the P-Ws are working their angle to the story while still minimizing actual information. The P-Ws really don't have any legal exposure, so there's very little downside to their attempts to work the refs, while GH is operating under the continued threat of legal action (even if it's remote, their attorneys are obviously being appropriately cautious here, so kudos to them).
Of the two statements, Tom Preston-Werner's statement is far more effective and well-crafted than his wife's; he comes across as -- at least for public consumption -- sincere, open and genuinely remorseful while affirming his dedication to Good Things and avoiding admitting to actual culpability. It's a very nicely-handled statement, and it's instructive to compare it to how MoCo and Eich handled their crisis du jour. (The OP statement by Theresa P-W, however, is less artful, more defensive, and personalizes the criticism. Understandable from a personal point of view; not good PR.)
How much of this is true? Well, does it matter? Truth is for courtrooms and confessionals; what matters here is spin. Again, consider MoCo. In both cases, an executive was ousted but, in GH's case, the company looks stronger for it (investigation by outside counsel! No wrongdoing found! Action taken!) and the P-Ws don't look much worse (we support diversity! Created an open culture! Feel terrible that some people felt hurt!).
The ouster of Eich, however, just made moCo look opportunistic and weak, and Eich personally came out looking pretty bad due to his inability to craft a solid message (he said the right things about diversity, but failed to connect it to his personal narrative, so it rang hollow). The lesson, I think, is either move quickly and aggressively (as GitHub did), or else buckle down and stay the course (as Mozilla should have -- though, as I've said previously, I have no issues whatsoever with the campaign to oust Eich). Anything else is going to make a problem into a crisis.
You probably want to read the reply above yours, or the FAQ it links. The announcement from Brendan was that he had chosen to resign. No evidence has been presented that he was fired or in any way pressured by the board to leave; in fact, everybody in the know who's commented publicly says it was the other way around (and always was -- it really looks like he never wanted to be CEO but was talked into it, then wanted to resign and others tried to talk him into staying).
Here is Mozilla's updated FAQ: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
Disclosure: I am a Mozilla employee.
These are the fears of a bad founder. Their job is to set the vision of the company. If the founder fears the employees feel they are disconnected, the founder probably is disconnected. If a founder should fear anything, they should fear not creating a safe environment where the employees can feel comfortable bringing their concerns to superiors — about any aspect of the company — instead of that self-centered fear of being “misunderstood”.
After weeks of silence, we learned that, despite, being found not guilty of the harassment accusations, questions popped up regarding Tom’s judgment in a separate area. We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit. We racked our brains trying to understand this new allegation.
Ummm... Perhaps it's because you're the CEO's wife and you're asking them to do something. It comes with the power.
I was the wife of the CEO, but that never entered my mind when I hung out with any GitHubbers.
Ummmm.... ok....
I have never known anyone like Tom. When I was interviewed by the 3rd party investigator, she abruptly asked if I thought Tom was naive. I was dumbfounded, unable to answer until she offered a different word; “Perhaps, you would call him optimistic?” Naive, no. Optimistic, absolutely.
ok, so at least it's not her husband that was naive.
Apparently there are still threats of legal suits around all this fun too. http://news.easybranches.com/news/1844059.html
What is this, Quora? When did Medium start with that?
We seem to be witnessing the convenient limits of discourse.