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One red flag in this case is that the CFO referred to PwC, a major accounting firm that her former company paid for some advice, as a reason why everything was
by memracom 13y ago
One red flag in this case is that the CFO referred to PwC, a major accounting firm that her former company paid for some advice, as a reason why everything was OK. This amounts to "trust me" because you have no access to the terms under which PwC was retained by the other company and no idea who actually examined the options accounting or under what circumstances. Shady dealing is often obscured by appeals to a higher power.
If you run into this in your own company you should be suspicious and try to get the company to hire an independent expert to review the situation, which is exactly what Ben did. For an expert to be truly independent they need to be retained by someone outside the group under suspicion.
Suspicion is not a bad thing as long as you deal with it promptly. Dealing with it clarifies the situation and removes the suspicion, one way or another.
- chubot 13y agoNot to be cynical, but isn't this why "consulting firms" exist? Part of their job is to just some "reputable" outside justification for something someone internally wants to do anyway. It's to cover their ass. When there are mass layoffs, they hire "consultants". Because nobody inside wants to really take responsibility for the decision. It's better politically to have it come from some "outside objective analysis" (of course there is not such thing, and outsiders are often the worst people to make such decisions.)
- memracom 13y agoThe way you describe it they are the worst sort of consultants. I once worked on a project that a big 5 consulting firm was charging 1.7 million to deliver. After 6 months, a tech savvy guy convinced the CEO to hire me for 3 months to sort everything out. I came in, had systems up and running partially (but delivering useful results) in 2 weeks. Then I spent the rest of the 3 months delivering every deliverable that the big 5 firm was behind on. The customer refused to pay the big 5 firm's bills and took them to court to recover money already paid out. The big 5 firm settled out of court by returning all money previously paid plus 90,000 for my bill. It was one of those secret settlements which is why I am fuzzy on the details, but when I mentioned it to other people in the software development business, the stories poured out. Note how Ben Horowitz did not just farm out the decisions to a prestigious consulting firm but gave it to a guy that he knew and who he had carefully checked out in order to know that he was trustworthy.
- cgio 13y agoI once went into a project where the runtime for a complex financial calculation (as complex as it can be) was 8 to 10 hers. In 2 weeks it was 37 seconds and working perfectly. When the CFO took me for dinner, I told him that 90% of the work was the old implementation, which set the right concepts, and I merely did an optimisation. Many times, the first take is not optimal, but I always try to appreciate the input I get even from suboptimal implementations.
- triplesec 13y agoHint us a company name, please! want to find the stories