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> We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where w

> We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly. To bad they're on the hyper-growth train now as well, but I guess their investors want to get some money back. I'd preferred seeing them grow slow and stable, because I feel that focusing solely on growth often leads to decisions not in the interest of the users.

lubonay 7y ago
It's not easy to balance between the needs of your stakeholders (investors/owners etc) and the needs of your actual users. I imagine that many companies experience a sort of death spiral once they start focusing too much on profit/growth/monetization at the expense of actually catering to their users' needs. On the other extreme, focusing too much on users and not enough on profit probably isn't a good way to remain in business for long...
- patio-chill 7y ago
  They have def given up their regular users in this point. Ads thing shared here is one item recently. Also think they can re license my content without asking (below): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-are-moving-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan... Plenty of other stuff in past year or two... (below): I shared it but no comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053475
duxup 7y ago
Yeah the pattern of: - Find thing that gets traction and growth. - Demand more growth than the thing you do well is providing. - Focus not on the thing you do well.... Seems to happen time and again. I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine. There are maybe just some good ideas out there that aren't meant to be unicorns, but are productive none the less but they get buried in other expectations.
- fisherjeff 7y ago
  Anyone have a link for that?
  - shreyas-satish 7y ago
    https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...
  - duxup 7y ago
    I found it: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-... Also here is where the project started on Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
- dmix 7y ago
  Bringing in outside management away from the original company founders is a common way this happens. Especially if they come from another traditional public company that only cares about share prices as the key metric. I can’t imagine someone messing up Stackoverflow, but Digg managed to do it so there’s always a way (although SO doesn’t have a high quality direct competitor like Reddit...yet.). The best time to take on a business is when they’ve peaked and get distracted, they forget about being the best in the market. I should note I don’t think SO is near that point yet.
  - SnarkAsh 7y ago
    Joel has already killed Stack Overflow beyond repair. Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find a few valuables to snatch for investors.
    - xjoins 7y ago
      Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say “Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find valuables to snatch”?
mandevil 7y ago
I suspect (based on nothing so take it for what that's worth) that the FogCreek Illuminati feel burned by the Trello experience: there they carefully tended, had high organic growth, spun it out to its own company after three years, and ended up selling for less than half a billion dollars in 2017. This is bad because 2017 was quite probably the highest valuations for privately held technology companies in this cycle, and they weren't a unicorn, unlike plenty of other companies at the time- Quora raised 85m at a 1.7g valuation in April 2017, to pick a business that FogCreek would know well. SO, like Trello, took a long time to find a business model (honestly Trello never really did); it seems clear that SO Jobs didn't work, but enterprise sales is the key, just based on what they emphasized in the announcement. Using the SaaS website as a loss leader advertisement for the shrinkwrap software is an interesting model: I see it as somewhat similar to the old 'give away Unix and C free to universities, sell System V to the companies those students work at' model, modernized for the internet age.
- triceratops 7y ago
  I dunno. Quora had a 1.7B valuation but Trello had an actual exit. If I were an investor or employee I might prefer the latter. $425M exit after a mere 3 years of operation as an independent company is nothing to sniff at. Trello is merely a shared todo list, when you boil it down. Was a unicorn exit necessarily expected of them?
  - adventured 7y ago
    I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle (as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead, AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now. Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so... back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr. These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow). Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC), your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.
sytelus 7y ago
Agreed. This “hyper growth” mindset is killing a lot of good things. Why can’t SO stay small, lean and mean? Last I knew it’s already generating descent revenues and good returns for investment. Injecting steroids to force if “grow” can really destroy its value and make look hideous.

lubonay 7y ago

It's not easy to balance between the needs of your stakeholders (investors/owners etc) and the needs of your actual users. I imagine that many companies experience a sort of death spiral once they start focusing too much on profit/growth/monetization at the expense of actually catering to their users' needs. On the other extreme, focusing too much on users and not enough on profit probably isn't a good way to remain in business for long...

patio-chill 7y ago
They have def given up their regular users in this point. Ads thing shared here is one item recently. Also think they can re license my content without asking (below): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-are-moving-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan... Plenty of other stuff in past year or two... (below): I shared it but no comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053475

duxup 7y ago

Yeah the pattern of: - Find thing that gets traction and growth. - Demand more growth than the thing you do well is providing. - Focus not on the thing you do well.... Seems to happen time and again. I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine. There are maybe just some good ideas out there that aren't meant to be unicorns, but are productive none the less but they get buried in other expectations.

fisherjeff 7y ago
Anyone have a link for that?
- shreyas-satish 7y ago
  https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...
- duxup 7y ago
  I found it: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-... Also here is where the project started on Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
dmix 7y ago
Bringing in outside management away from the original company founders is a common way this happens. Especially if they come from another traditional public company that only cares about share prices as the key metric. I can’t imagine someone messing up Stackoverflow, but Digg managed to do it so there’s always a way (although SO doesn’t have a high quality direct competitor like Reddit...yet.). The best time to take on a business is when they’ve peaked and get distracted, they forget about being the best in the market. I should note I don’t think SO is near that point yet.
- SnarkAsh 7y ago
  Joel has already killed Stack Overflow beyond repair. Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find a few valuables to snatch for investors.
  - xjoins 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say “Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find valuables to snatch”?

mandevil 7y ago

I suspect (based on nothing so take it for what that's worth) that the FogCreek Illuminati feel burned by the Trello experience: there they carefully tended, had high organic growth, spun it out to its own company after three years, and ended up selling for less than half a billion dollars in 2017. This is bad because 2017 was quite probably the highest valuations for privately held technology companies in this cycle, and they weren't a unicorn, unlike plenty of other companies at the time- Quora raised 85m at a 1.7g valuation in April 2017, to pick a business that FogCreek would know well. SO, like Trello, took a long time to find a business model (honestly Trello never really did); it seems clear that SO Jobs didn't work, but enterprise sales is the key, just based on what they emphasized in the announcement. Using the SaaS website as a loss leader advertisement for the shrinkwrap software is an interesting model: I see it as somewhat similar to the old 'give away Unix and C free to universities, sell System V to the companies those students work at' model, modernized for the internet age.

triceratops 7y ago
I dunno. Quora had a 1.7B valuation but Trello had an actual exit. If I were an investor or employee I might prefer the latter. $425M exit after a mere 3 years of operation as an independent company is nothing to sniff at. Trello is merely a shared todo list, when you boil it down. Was a unicorn exit necessarily expected of them?
- adventured 7y ago
  I agree with that premise. Quora will be lucky to bail out with a $425 million exit on the downside of this expansion. They're a decade old, the VCs are going to want their money soon and the clock is ticking on this long up-cycle (as the desperate IPO rush blatantly indicates). Who is paying $1+ billion for Quora? There are no overpaying buyers for that type of entity - Yahoo is dead, AOL is dead, and InteractiveCorp is far too shrewd to pay that extreme valuation. Quora is worth $100-$200m tops right now. Genius is in the same boat. A decade old, failed premise (turns out people don't actually want to annotate everything), failed expansion plans (so... back to lyrics then), no business model. At the mercy of the VCs, they'll eventually be passed around for $10m or $20m like MySpace or Tumblr. These companies are this start-up generation's About.com (or the latest eHow). Simple rule for anyone doing a knowledge service: if you put the profit motive over the knowledge motive (which is the only choice if you take a lot of VC), your service will end up in the dustbin of history, no exceptions.

sytelus 7y ago

Agreed. This “hyper growth” mindset is killing a lot of good things. Why can’t SO stay small, lean and mean? Last I knew it’s already generating descent revenues and good returns for investment. Injecting steroids to force if “grow” can really destroy its value and make look hideous.