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The author opens by nobly asserting "I take all responsibility for the failure" yet then, everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him who he is no

The author opens by nobly asserting "I take all responsibility for the failure" yet then, everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him who he is now suing. Feels kind of inauthentic overall.

cyberferret 8y ago
I put some of that down to him not writing in his native language - perhaps it is more difficult for him to translate feelings or concepts to English. But I do agree that it would have been better to hear about some of his own failings or bad decisions. Hard to imagine his co-founder would try to eject him from the company without at least some perception of an issue with his character, skills or decisions.
- dannypgh 8y ago
  Yeah; to be honest I couldn't make it to the end of this "postmortem" because of how badly it seems to want to assign blame. I have taken part in numerous postmortems for multi-million dollar outages, and find they're valuable only when starting from the premise that we're all smart people trying to do our best, so any mistakes made by people are indicative of too much being asked of the people (lack of training/system complexity too high/lack of training/lack of automation). Besides the fact this leads to AIs that are actionable and positive for engineers to tackle, hiring is really hard. If you're just going to blame your partners or coworkers and aren't providing any insight on how to choose partners or employees better, I'm really not interested.
nyrulez 8y ago
How is that incompatible? If you partner with a crook, can't you take a responsibility for making that mistake (of not seeing the signs) but still call the other person out for being a crook? Taking responsibility is different from saying other did no wrong.
- blazespin 8y ago
  It’s my fault everyone around me is an idiot. Lol
- kokey 8y ago
  I have to play devil's advocate here, because we know one side of the story. Perhaps the partner is not a crook, perhaps he was just not rich enough, hence why he was the recipient of a small salary in the first year and was unable to come up with further money to put into the company since his family didn't have any to risk, and why when the company generated actual revenue gave his family members opportunities to work with him. It sounds like the company's revenue consisted of one big customer and it folded when that customer was lost, but there's very little details of why that happened.
psergeant 8y ago
I was going to simply quote: > I, not my cofounder and ex-best friend Miguel Angel Maldonado, was to blame and note: “this is not apparently something the author actually believes”!
brazzy 8y ago
> everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him No. It's the part that takes up the most space, but there are a number of other, perfectly useful conclusions, like "you need a product and customers, not a technology", and "adapting to customer needs brings you succees".

cyberferret 8y ago

I put some of that down to him not writing in his native language - perhaps it is more difficult for him to translate feelings or concepts to English. But I do agree that it would have been better to hear about some of his own failings or bad decisions. Hard to imagine his co-founder would try to eject him from the company without at least some perception of an issue with his character, skills or decisions.

dannypgh 8y ago
Yeah; to be honest I couldn't make it to the end of this "postmortem" because of how badly it seems to want to assign blame. I have taken part in numerous postmortems for multi-million dollar outages, and find they're valuable only when starting from the premise that we're all smart people trying to do our best, so any mistakes made by people are indicative of too much being asked of the people (lack of training/system complexity too high/lack of training/lack of automation). Besides the fact this leads to AIs that are actionable and positive for engineers to tackle, hiring is really hard. If you're just going to blame your partners or coworkers and aren't providing any insight on how to choose partners or employees better, I'm really not interested.

nyrulez 8y ago

How is that incompatible? If you partner with a crook, can't you take a responsibility for making that mistake (of not seeing the signs) but still call the other person out for being a crook? Taking responsibility is different from saying other did no wrong.

blazespin 8y ago
It’s my fault everyone around me is an idiot. Lol
kokey 8y ago
I have to play devil's advocate here, because we know one side of the story. Perhaps the partner is not a crook, perhaps he was just not rich enough, hence why he was the recipient of a small salary in the first year and was unable to come up with further money to put into the company since his family didn't have any to risk, and why when the company generated actual revenue gave his family members opportunities to work with him. It sounds like the company's revenue consisted of one big customer and it folded when that customer was lost, but there's very little details of why that happened.

psergeant 8y ago

I was going to simply quote: > I, not my cofounder and ex-best friend Miguel Angel Maldonado, was to blame and note: “this is not apparently something the author actually believes”!

brazzy 8y ago

> everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him No. It's the part that takes up the most space, but there are a number of other, perfectly useful conclusions, like "you need a product and customers, not a technology", and "adapting to customer needs brings you succees".