3 ms·

Why I got fired as President and co-founder of Udemy, a now-$2B unicorn

2 points by dsr12 6y ago

gigatexal 6y ago
A terrible employee at the first startup I joined (see racist, anger issues, etc) caused a lot of us to leave. If you're going to run a team, nay, if you're going to work with people it pays to invest in some people skills.
- ksaj 6y ago
  A startup I worked at for a short while was run by a guy who wouldn't stop trying to convince me he was the real Satoshi. Also he was in several different wars, and was shot through the chest back-to-front with a scud missile. Oh, and his girlfriend was part djinn (a real-world genie!). He was fighting with the military because they apparently lost all record of him having ever even served as Special Ops. Amazing. He was, by far, the scrawniest "ex-military" guy I've ever met. I quit, still unable to tell if he actually had a product, or if he was stringing on his investors. What I did find was a whole lot of plagiarism in what looked to be the code for his product. Take the code from a book on Proto Lisp programming and sprinkle in a bit of Rigetti's work liberally, and voila, originality! I'm betting the money guys aren't going to be happy with him for long, if they are still funding him. He just frustrated me so much I gave up on a whole lot of money just to avoid having to listen to his nonsense anymore. It was frankly quite embarrassing having to pretend I was interested in his stories, considering how fictional and bizarre everything he had to say was. Apparently months after I left, he was ejected by police from his office space. I never heard what actually caused it, but police aren't usually involved in landlord/tenant issues, and he definitely had enough money for the rent anyway. I don't know how people like these manage to get funded in the first place. But now he's still pretending to be an expert in quantum mechanics from his kitchen table. I feel sorry for anyone that gets sucked into his "startup."
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Military guy with a genie girlfriend. Now where did he come up with that idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie
    - ksaj 6y ago
      Wow... I hadn't made that connection. You've both helped make sense of his altered reality, and made it weirder at the same time. I think you are probably right.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    Oh man oh man. Now that sounds traumatic. I’m sorry. Regarding how he got funded? The markets are crazy. And everyone is looking for yield. Interest rates this low mean almost anyone with a good story that could swindle investors with a tale can get funded or so it seems.
    - ksaj 6y ago
      He has last year's buzzword bingo win: quantum computing and AI on the same card. It took me only a week to learn that he was an utter crackpot. Maybe it is willful blindness on the investors' side, since they had already signed on the dotted line. I found it entirely hard to believe that they weren't scratching their heads every time he spoke.

2 points by dsr12 6y ago

A terrible employee at the first startup I joined (see racist, anger issues, etc) caused a lot of us to leave. If you're going to run a team, nay, if you're going to work with people it pays to invest in some people skills.

ksaj 6y ago
A startup I worked at for a short while was run by a guy who wouldn't stop trying to convince me he was the real Satoshi. Also he was in several different wars, and was shot through the chest back-to-front with a scud missile. Oh, and his girlfriend was part djinn (a real-world genie!). He was fighting with the military because they apparently lost all record of him having ever even served as Special Ops. Amazing. He was, by far, the scrawniest "ex-military" guy I've ever met. I quit, still unable to tell if he actually had a product, or if he was stringing on his investors. What I did find was a whole lot of plagiarism in what looked to be the code for his product. Take the code from a book on Proto Lisp programming and sprinkle in a bit of Rigetti's work liberally, and voila, originality! I'm betting the money guys aren't going to be happy with him for long, if they are still funding him. He just frustrated me so much I gave up on a whole lot of money just to avoid having to listen to his nonsense anymore. It was frankly quite embarrassing having to pretend I was interested in his stories, considering how fictional and bizarre everything he had to say was. Apparently months after I left, he was ejected by police from his office space. I never heard what actually caused it, but police aren't usually involved in landlord/tenant issues, and he definitely had enough money for the rent anyway. I don't know how people like these manage to get funded in the first place. But now he's still pretending to be an expert in quantum mechanics from his kitchen table. I feel sorry for anyone that gets sucked into his "startup."
- kazinator 6y ago
  Military guy with a genie girlfriend. Now where did he come up with that idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie
  - ksaj 6y ago
    Wow... I hadn't made that connection. You've both helped make sense of his altered reality, and made it weirder at the same time. I think you are probably right.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Oh man oh man. Now that sounds traumatic. I’m sorry. Regarding how he got funded? The markets are crazy. And everyone is looking for yield. Interest rates this low mean almost anyone with a good story that could swindle investors with a tale can get funded or so it seems.
  - ksaj 6y ago
    He has last year's buzzword bingo win: quantum computing and AI on the same card. It took me only a week to learn that he was an utter crackpot. Maybe it is willful blindness on the investors' side, since they had already signed on the dotted line. I found it entirely hard to believe that they weren't scratching their heads every time he spoke.