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First thing to do: Recognizing your own failure. You seem to charge solely the CEO for the failure of the company and you may be right. But you can't be the nu

First thing to do: Recognizing your own failure. You seem to charge solely the CEO for the failure of the company and you may be right. But you can't be the number 2 of a company and not taking your part of responsibility. Does your innovation was truly disruptive? Maybe not. Do you provide awesome products that make customers' eyes cry? Maybe not. In you area of work, you seem to be in charge of products and research. Where are the results of the research? Where are the products? Where the open-source projects? You seem to forget why you got money, time and public subsidies. You seem to forget to explain why you guys were disruptive. Your only fault cannot be to not confront the ceo sooner. Again, failure is okay. Do not worry.

nickstinemates 13y ago
Agree. Proper grammar and editing of your own content also might help.
- hartator 13y ago
  Sorry, I have made some corrections. (English is my second language) Do you see anything else?
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    You are communicating a difficult lesson very well. Do you want me to copy-edit the text? I can do this later Wednesday evening (UK time zone)?
    - oncletom 13y ago
      Are you proposing to copy-edit the blog post? If so, this is kind and much appreciated :-) If you have a GitHub account you can directly edit the content through the following URL, and propose your changes. > https://github.com/oncletom/oncletom.io/blob/master/source/_posts/2014/why-our-startup-failed.md https://github.com/oncletom/oncletom.io/blob/master/source/_...
      - keithpeter 13y ago
        No git account so will just post it here. No major issues with your communication, just obviously not English as first language.
        keithpeter 13y ago
        OK, here is the first 40% of my (light) edit of the original post. This took about 90 minutes which is longer than I thought it would. The rest can be done Sunday... OP: is this too far from your inner voice, what you intended? Is the edit worth finishing? I'm having to link to the text file as HN says the 1200 word extract is too long. Markdown https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite Formatted to 55 col https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite2 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite2 PS: I need to sort my editing tools out! I just used two plain text editor windows side by side and it was clunky.
- vorador 13y ago
  The author is french, give him some slack.
jtheory 13y ago
The author mentions quite a few times how he/she ignored lots of problems, from the very beginning -- the CEO was far too full of buzzwords, etc.. This was also apparently a product that could gather a complicated mass of data that would be valuable, but difficult to use. I'm not sure of how it should balance mea culpa with "he did it", exactly, but the author certainly doesn't come across as free of guilt over the failure.
oncletom 13y ago
Fair point, especially as I thought I have been acknowledging my mistakes enough. They are concentrated in the "Ignoring problems" part, mainly. I blame myself to have ignored the problems, and not to have acted on them. The overconfidence as well: I thought we would know soon enough if we needed to stop. For a zero loss operation. If we follow that direction, I would have never accepted to join the project. I have been naive enough and my lack of experience did not help me to react properly, and in time. That's what happens when you play with grown up people, on your own and without requesting neutral advices ;-) Also, I have challenged the CEO (and his partner, she was a cofounder and the head of marketing… yes I simplified the problem not to report the failure on people but rather on the behaviours)… it is just it is technically very difficult to trigger something when you have 6% of the shares, and when all the powers are concentrated in one person. Which means that if he wanted something, he could have it. Even firing me for no real reason (when you have an R&D gov discount in France you can fire anyone related to R&D). I did not relate it much as well but everything was fine on the technical side. At least the process and the everyday life. This, has been my best work experience: we open sourced/improved Node.js libraries as much as we could (and eventually became friend with the sigma.js author). Maybe it was useless but surveying the whole insurance market through online opinions mining for a specific country in less than two day is somewhat valuable for whom is able to pay you for those data ;-)). PS: I am not a native English speaker so any feedback to correct the mistakes are welcome. There is a "Contribute" link at the end of the article: open a PR ;-)
- josephlord 13y ago
  I think the fact that at it sounds like you weren't getting the accounts (at least cash flow and bank balances) so that you could see the lack of runway coming is quite alarming and the top lesson I would want to learn from your experience would be to demand such information.
  - oncletom 13y ago
    Read that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7701017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7701017), it gives more insights on why it was "impossible" to get access to them. I agree this should be a core principle: no access, no involvement. Except that when it has been decided not to give access to them, the company configuration prevented any action against the will of the CEO. I should have resigned. This would have led to the resignation of the other engineers and the death of the project. I did not want that at first.

nickstinemates 13y ago

Agree. Proper grammar and editing of your own content also might help.

hartator 13y ago
Sorry, I have made some corrections. (English is my second language) Do you see anything else?
- keithpeter 13y ago
  You are communicating a difficult lesson very well. Do you want me to copy-edit the text? I can do this later Wednesday evening (UK time zone)?
  - oncletom 13y ago
    Are you proposing to copy-edit the blog post? If so, this is kind and much appreciated :-) If you have a GitHub account you can directly edit the content through the following URL, and propose your changes. > https://github.com/oncletom/oncletom.io/blob/master/source/_posts/2014/why-our-startup-failed.md https://github.com/oncletom/oncletom.io/blob/master/source/_...
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      No git account so will just post it here. No major issues with your communication, just obviously not English as first language.
      - keithpeter 13y ago
        OK, here is the first 40% of my (light) edit of the original post. This took about 90 minutes which is longer than I thought it would. The rest can be done Sunday... OP: is this too far from your inner voice, what you intended? Is the edit worth finishing? I'm having to link to the text file as HN says the 1200 word extract is too long. Markdown https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite Formatted to 55 col https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite2 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/Dijiwan-rewrite2 PS: I need to sort my editing tools out! I just used two plain text editor windows side by side and it was clunky.
vorador 13y ago
The author is french, give him some slack.

jtheory 13y ago

The author mentions quite a few times how he/she ignored lots of problems, from the very beginning -- the CEO was far too full of buzzwords, etc.. This was also apparently a product that could gather a complicated mass of data that would be valuable, but difficult to use. I'm not sure of how it should balance mea culpa with "he did it", exactly, but the author certainly doesn't come across as free of guilt over the failure.

oncletom 13y ago

Fair point, especially as I thought I have been acknowledging my mistakes enough. They are concentrated in the "Ignoring problems" part, mainly. I blame myself to have ignored the problems, and not to have acted on them. The overconfidence as well: I thought we would know soon enough if we needed to stop. For a zero loss operation. If we follow that direction, I would have never accepted to join the project. I have been naive enough and my lack of experience did not help me to react properly, and in time. That's what happens when you play with grown up people, on your own and without requesting neutral advices ;-) Also, I have challenged the CEO (and his partner, she was a cofounder and the head of marketing… yes I simplified the problem not to report the failure on people but rather on the behaviours)… it is just it is technically very difficult to trigger something when you have 6% of the shares, and when all the powers are concentrated in one person. Which means that if he wanted something, he could have it. Even firing me for no real reason (when you have an R&D gov discount in France you can fire anyone related to R&D). I did not relate it much as well but everything was fine on the technical side. At least the process and the everyday life. This, has been my best work experience: we open sourced/improved Node.js libraries as much as we could (and eventually became friend with the sigma.js author). Maybe it was useless but surveying the whole insurance market through online opinions mining for a specific country in less than two day is somewhat valuable for whom is able to pay you for those data ;-)). PS: I am not a native English speaker so any feedback to correct the mistakes are welcome. There is a "Contribute" link at the end of the article: open a PR ;-)

josephlord 13y ago
I think the fact that at it sounds like you weren't getting the accounts (at least cash flow and bank balances) so that you could see the lack of runway coming is quite alarming and the top lesson I would want to learn from your experience would be to demand such information.
- oncletom 13y ago
  Read that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7701017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7701017), it gives more insights on why it was "impossible" to get access to them. I agree this should be a core principle: no access, no involvement. Except that when it has been decided not to give access to them, the company configuration prevented any action against the will of the CEO. I should have resigned. This would have led to the resignation of the other engineers and the death of the project. I did not want that at first.