3 ms·
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
by lenerdenator 2y ago
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
- wmf 2y agoWith apologies to Louis XIV, Matt is Automattic.
- lenerdenator 2y agowait, did he put his name in the company name? if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
- duskwuff 2y ago> wait, did he put his name in the company name? Yes.
- Jare 2y agoOr it just sounded like a fun joke for a good company name... I mean you are not wrong, but pretty much any successful young entrepreneur must have some degree of excessive appreciation for themselves, and this one was already achieving that status at 19.
- groby_b 2y agoKnowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell. If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
- em-bee 2y agoi don't think that is how a tell works. of course now we know. hindsight and all that. to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side. the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
- apocalyptic0n3 2y agoYes. He also calls the employees Automatticians. So they're all just Matt.
- zem 2y agoguess their jobs were just automatted away!
- yallpendantools 2y agoIt's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0. Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now. It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative. There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark. I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
- willvarfar 2y agoYeap, Automatic is not a good trade name but Automattic is great!
- Brian_K_White 2y agoYes but this isn't really much of a crime or tell to me. The name is great as far as I'm concerned. And he's full of himself and completely wrong in this crusade he launched for some reason, completely indefensible acts left & right for over a year. Both true.
- pjc50 2y agoL'etatt, c'est M'att.
- o11c 2y agoFor the unaware (or under-aware): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi Probably apocryphal. A lot of people these days only know it from Star Wars.
- dangrossman 2y agoFrom Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
- mritchie712 2y agohe'd already be out if it was simple to force him out
- lenerdenator 2y agoLet this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoSame with trading your time for stock options (that you hope are eventually negotiable shares); trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoDilution is a real problem. If they want you to act like a Founder, you should have protected equity like one.
- em-bee 2y agobut the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoHow did they "ruin" a company if that company made money?