I don't think there was any reason to assume a post title starting with 'dynamic type' would use open to refer to open-source - how could there possibly be a correlation?
The reason would be am unfamiliarity with the use of the term "open" in a typing context. Without that knowledge, "open source" would be the next most plausibly related usage.
The original poster is saying that as founder, no one cares to the level you do, no one else has as much at stake, others care but to a point.
The original posts point is that as founder it’s really up to you and no one else.
If this fails, as founder you lose all the things you risked, possibly everything you have. No one else is likely to have as much at risk as you. This means you care in a way and to a depth no one else does.
Of course others care, of course your grandma cares, of course your momma cares, of course head of marketing cares and of course the investor cares, but none of these people have everything on the line.
Everyone else except you can walk away. No one else is going to relentlessly hit this problem till it’s solves except you.
In my opinion, you're fundamentally mis-interpreting the original post. The author is NOT saying that you as a founder care more about your success than, say, your stakeholders. If you fail, they care, and a lot, because you made them lose money.
What the post is saying is that they don't care about you having a story about WHY you failed. Nobody else cares about that.
To stay in the metaphor, if you lose a game and your story is "well we have a lot of injuries", the only thing other people will hear is "yep, here's someone who's trying to find an excuse for why he failed".
They don't care you have a nice little theory about why you lost. They want you to win. So focus on finding a way to win, not to explain your loss.
Whether that's wise advice I don't know. I feel that knowing why you failed is important per se, even if other people don't care.
I agree it’s important to know individually why you failed, this goes along with self awareness which is critical in all facets of life.
That said, after working with a lot of people in problem solving careers you’ll tend to see that the excuse vs adjustment response is not purely situational; different personalities will tend to one or the other. There’s sometimes a thin line between honest analysis of failure and reflexive ego protection. Whether founder or not you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that line.
This is only true where the founder has the most risk relative to the rest, but I'd say that's often not so. Founders can have a career stream to fall back to, additional capital, Etc. Some people could risk being on the street if they lose their job.
There are also numerous ways the founder can walk away
Isn’t the lack of equitable outcome a major driver in this? Of course head of marketing will not care as much - they will not be compensated as much if they solve your business problem’. Both in status and money.
As a counter example - we can look at organizations which have goals that are not only monetary in nature - spacex, nasa in the 50s, the red cross - organizations where there are plenty of people that care about the goal alongside the founders to a great extend. Plenty of people there outside of leadership also care a lot.
A startup that picks a worthy goal like that can in fact attract those types and do so regularly. People do care.
Individual founders that are most likely to be a current or past employees, and not someone that has climbed into the C-suite.
There is no golden parachute for a new private company. If it fails, the founder will likely have to go back to regular employment (much more difficult if he exited stable employment to work full time on his project). Whatever money is used up (usually personal) is lost forever and any plans of retirement must be pushed back.
OKCupid specifically requires your real name which is beyond stupid for a dating site.
Anyone whose done online dating knows about stalkers and the need to hide your identity but these guys want real names.
As for Grindr we’ll isnt that owned by China? What better place to entrust your most compromising personal information, and what better long term investment if you want compromising information that one day in the distant future might be to your advantage.
Even before requiring your real name, OkCupid was pretty blah for some people, a friend of mine had a woman message him, before he could reply, with a few things in his profile she was able to identify him and then went full psycho. Ultimately she made multiple posts on Cheaterville.com and made claims he gave her STDs etc, which cost him an acting job when the casting people googled him and BAM it was one of the first things to pop up. The messages she sent were just nuts, I documented them here: https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2012/1/20/a-troll-a...
Now, I wonder if perhaps staff/owners of Cheaterville weren't using dating sites to attempt to find people to blackmail. IIRC the site would remove any posts about you for a hefty fee.
I was an early adopter of OkCupid, in fact long before they were acquired I was actually a volunteer moderator. It was interest in the early days because you could tag stuff "I like [[Metallica]], I read a lot of [[science fiction]], and I like to eat [[pizza]] before going to [[SCA]] fighter practice" and you could find people with similar interests that way, which was cool. I actually met some really cool women and am still friends with a couple of them. But then it started going downhill pretty quickly once they were purchased by the Match.com folks. Lots of dumb changes, removal of long-standing features, drastic increase in spam messages from people hundreds (or thousands) of miles away, requiring real names etc.
Didn't surprise me.
Every single time I'd pay for a Match.com account (over multiple years, as recently as last year), within a day of my subscription someone would message me. I'd always, like a sucker, pay again and reply and nothing... or they'd reply once or twice with very basic replies and stop. Now, I'm not saying they're scamming users to get them to pay for another month but... sure feels like it.
I anecdotally noticed a massive increase in spam/fake accounts when the same company bought Tinder too.
This sounds to me more like "better police involvement around the crime of stalking" than "okcupid are bad"
I can see why having "screen names" is good and why having "Jenny S from NYC" beats "picture of Jennifer Smith, 32 acadia Avenue Queens" on the site profile but if it's crime we worry about, it's police we need.
I would be interested in knowing if I am deaf to a much larger problem than I am aware of.
Isn't it better to prevent undesirable behaviour in the first place rather than place additional burden on the police (for a trivial mostly non-dangerous behaviour)?
Also, is stalking actually a crime now? When does "wanting to talk to someone" become a crime? Are recruiters stalking me on LinkedIn? What if they keep sending me emails and I keep not replying?
I think the bar for putting people in jail should be much higher than that.
Eh, we are not really talking about facebook "stalking" with someone looking at your facebook profile, but about people continually harassing you and trying to contact you through all sorts of means.
I think the bar for putting people in jail for the above is just right, might even be too low.
Stalking has a crime in all of the US states for 15 years, and has been a crime in most for longer than that.
If you are repeatedly contacting or surveilling someone, despite being told to stop, and are making them feel unsafe or intimidated, then you are probably violating the laws against stalking.
Yes. Yes it is.
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(Or maybe it’s not. Or something in between.)
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Ok wait... isn’t Indeed for jobs and MLS for real estate and other aggregators “spamming” also?
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Ideally there would just be metadata about a project and one button you press to deploy and each side would be responsible for curating what they listen to.
You’d be crazy to guarantee exclusivity when negotiating sale of your company.
It would make more sense to give an absolute assurance that you’re talking to all possible buyers and that the potential buyer should understand that you might easily sell at any moment.
Exclusive negotiation is the precise opposite of a good approach.
Indeed implying that there are other negotiating parties is almost an essential component of any such negotiation.
As others say, once you reach the point of a letter of intent-- there's no way a buyer wants you carrying their LOI around to everyone in the world trying to get a better offer while the buyer is committing resources trying to get the deal done.
It's reasonable to expect a ("reverse") break-up fee, but it is not likely to be half the deal value.
Maybe a no shop clause should have a tight time to live.... “ok we commit but only if you put the money in our account within seven days, after that shopping is ok”
There's a lot of misconceptions here around how corporate acquisitions work. Here's typically how things work in practice when companies are sold:
- Seller attempts to garner interest, sometimes facilitated by an investment bank.
- Buyers indicate interest informally, eventually culminating in a Letter of Intent (LOI) from each buyer indicating a price and other important factors related to a deal.
- A cricitical component of the LOI is an exclusivity period - a duration of time where the buyer is able to conduct due diligence in exclusivity. It's clearly in the best interest of the seller to minimize the duration of the exclusivity period.
- Discoveries in the exclusivity period are typically grounds for renegotiation. Vulture buyers typically crush sellers and completely renegotiate a deal in this period banking on the fact that the seller has no alternatives post exclusivity. Good buyers know their reputation is at stake if they renegotiate an LOI and will only do so if material things show up in diligence (reasonably common).
- The LOI is not an obligation to purchase. Mostly the buyer is putting their reputation on the line.
- Earnest money is extremely rare in corporate acquisitions because the buyer universe is sufficiently small such that reputation is a sufficient motivator for good behavior. That said, anything is negotiable and you can go against tradition at any point if you have enough leverage (interested buyers).
In the OPs case, the buyer was not disclosed. Did they lose any reputation? How to roll the ball to let people know that someone screwed you up without damaging own reputation?
I’m sure they did. All of Baremetrics lawyers and investors know who it is. Investor circles are small - word gets around. Same with lawyers. The number of times I’ve heard “yeah, we know those guys, I wouldn’t recommend working with them” in board meetings is high.
Brokers are pretty well connected and ours made sure to spread their name around. They'll have a hard time buying a company through typical routes for a while.
I'm also perfectly happy to let anyone know in private who it is. :) DM me on Twitter (@Shpigford) or email: josh@baremetrics.com
> What does "changes" mean in this context and what constitutes a reasonable reverse break-up fee?
It's unlikely whatever the buyer throws over the wall first is exactly what you want to sign.
> Also in #2, does "probe interest" mean getting them to sign a LOI?
If company A approaches you, wanting to acquire you, you want to really quickly figure out if company B, company C, and company D are interested before you commit to a period of exclusivity with A.
> If company A approaches you, wanting to acquire you, you want to really quickly figure out if company B, company C, and company D are interested before you commit to a period of exclusivity with A.
Let's say that company A, B and C are interested (with A being interested the most), what would be the next step? Can you get an offer without a LOI?
Good luck finding a counterparty that won't ask for a no shop clause. As a VC all our term sheets have legally binding no shop and confidentiality clauses. That's industry standard.
For better or worse, exclusivity in an LOI is the norm. Obviously, you don't have to accept the LOI, but any LOI that is missing exclusivity is usually a sign of inexperience and honestly is cause for concern.
I was really taken with beos when it was a live product. However, Nextstep really was a much much better basis for taking Apple into the future compared to beos. As has been proven resoundingly first by the seamless switch from PowerPC to intel, and then the ongoing smoothness and general acceptance of OS X by industry.
I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything I could have wanted from an operating system.
