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Little more digging... here's what I think is going on, and it's sad. I've pieced this together based on Google searches. Sails was started by Mike McNeil, wh

Little more digging... here's what I think is going on, and it's sad. I've pieced this together based on Google searches. Sails was started by Mike McNeil, who also started a company called Balderdash to do consulting and dev work using Sails. From what I can tell Balderdash isn't quite a "real" company in that everyone listed as working there also does other things at present (http://i.imgur.com/dFVQawi.png http://i.imgur.com/dFVQawi.png). (Mike also started a product company that utilizes Sails called Treeline. Full disclosure, I've been to some of their meetups in Austin, they seemed like clever guys.) LinkedIn paints a slightly different picture (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=2604050 https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=2604050) with a few more employees listed, including listing both Mike and Travis Webb as "CEO" (http://i.imgur.com/onnhqqO.png http://i.imgur.com/onnhqqO.png). Given the size of the company, and the fact that the staff seem to be doing other things, I'd assume someone told Travis, "Hey you can be CEO, but you have to hit some metrics... and if you don't you can't be CEO any more..." And given some of the bickery on the other threads... maybe it wasn't clear or maybe those metrics weren't possible given the range of projects Mike and the other people were working on. We've all been there... Client says, "Yeah we'd like to work with you, but... Do A, B, C, and fix X, Y, Z first..." maybe Travis needed Mike's help and didn't get it. But who knows, and regardless it sounds like Travis was shown the door. So, and you can see this in the numerous videos where Travis has been promoting Sails the last few years (just Google, he comes up for all the training / discussions around Sails), Travis really liked Sails, and had his feelings hurt because he couldn't work on the project he really liked. And in response, he's now saying, "Burn the ships, Sails is dead, everyone come with me to Trails." Guy goes from being a huge Sails fanboy in hours and hours of videos that are posted online, to coming here 2 weeks later saying, paraphrased, "I'm going to build my own Sails... with blackjack, and hookers." This scenario sucks for everyone. You hire a good dev, someone who knows how to get the technology side done... he offers to step up to a bigger role... but who knows, maybe he can't make sales, can't retain customers, he isn't a leader, or isn't focused on the company needs because he's only interested in being a dev... but wants the title of CE-something because he's 22 and it's an ego boost... so rather than leave with dignity, and move on to his next job going back to what he was good at, he is out to sink the people he had been working with. That's my read. I could be totally wrong, but the drama here peeked my curiosity and after an hour of digging around that's what I came up with.

traviswebb 11y ago
Your assessment is perfectly logical based on the information you have available, and also mostly wrong. First, I'm not 22, and our COO ran the largest jQuery cobsulting firm (appendTo) for 5 years. Second, McNeil did not hire us, we purchased the company; McNeil has no ownership in the "new" Balderdash. Your educated guesses about hitting metrics and so forth don't apply to anything here. Mike McNeil needs control of Sails.js because he promised it to his VC investors behind treeline. We did not know this when we entered into the acquisition of Balderdash, and that's not what we signed up for. Since we were lied to for nearly a year, we are pivoting the company and our open-source efforts toward other things. Trails is one of those things.
- dbg31415 11y ago
  Not sure how Mike can kick you out if he doesn't own the company. Sounds like either he does own the company, or he's not the one who kicked you out... Anyway I'm inclined to believe the company website. If you bought the company you've got access to the site? DNS? Or a contract? Doesn't seem like that's the case given your actions trying to get people to move away from Sails. So yeah, you saying the project is dead when you know others are still working on it, and trying to tell other people to switch with you -- seems at best shady. Getting a project rolling is hard enough without an active saboteur. Not a great way to get your own business going. Seems to me -- outsider perspective -- you should just move on and focus on your own thing. Clean breaks, right?
  - traviswebb 11y ago
    He owned some of the assets, still, including the github org. Even though we negotiated an agreement, and were operating the company under the assumptions of that agreement, McNeil refused to sign it at the last minute and spent the past two months clawing everything back that he could. We still own the Balderdash LinkedIn page and npm account, for example. He refuses to speak with me directly, so there's no resolution to this yet. Nor do we really understand why he decided on this course of action at all. I hope to bring things back to some equilibrium, but one permanent change is that we are no longer supporting Sails, and are directing all our efforts toward developing Trails. The maintained-ness of Sails is really a separate issue from the ceo-schism drama. There are plenty of other literature which discuss the technical deficits of Sails, and the incredible amount of work it needs merely to be viable as an enterprise framework. That it relies on EOL'd dependencies, and has no plans to upgrade them, is an example.

traviswebb 11y ago

Your assessment is perfectly logical based on the information you have available, and also mostly wrong. First, I'm not 22, and our COO ran the largest jQuery cobsulting firm (appendTo) for 5 years. Second, McNeil did not hire us, we purchased the company; McNeil has no ownership in the "new" Balderdash. Your educated guesses about hitting metrics and so forth don't apply to anything here. Mike McNeil needs control of Sails.js because he promised it to his VC investors behind treeline. We did not know this when we entered into the acquisition of Balderdash, and that's not what we signed up for. Since we were lied to for nearly a year, we are pivoting the company and our open-source efforts toward other things. Trails is one of those things.

dbg31415 11y ago
Not sure how Mike can kick you out if he doesn't own the company. Sounds like either he does own the company, or he's not the one who kicked you out... Anyway I'm inclined to believe the company website. If you bought the company you've got access to the site? DNS? Or a contract? Doesn't seem like that's the case given your actions trying to get people to move away from Sails. So yeah, you saying the project is dead when you know others are still working on it, and trying to tell other people to switch with you -- seems at best shady. Getting a project rolling is hard enough without an active saboteur. Not a great way to get your own business going. Seems to me -- outsider perspective -- you should just move on and focus on your own thing. Clean breaks, right?
- traviswebb 11y ago
  He owned some of the assets, still, including the github org. Even though we negotiated an agreement, and were operating the company under the assumptions of that agreement, McNeil refused to sign it at the last minute and spent the past two months clawing everything back that he could. We still own the Balderdash LinkedIn page and npm account, for example. He refuses to speak with me directly, so there's no resolution to this yet. Nor do we really understand why he decided on this course of action at all. I hope to bring things back to some equilibrium, but one permanent change is that we are no longer supporting Sails, and are directing all our efforts toward developing Trails. The maintained-ness of Sails is really a separate issue from the ceo-schism drama. There are plenty of other literature which discuss the technical deficits of Sails, and the incredible amount of work it needs merely to be viable as an enterprise framework. That it relies on EOL'd dependencies, and has no plans to upgrade them, is an example.