The Mad Giggler on :
I greatly regret the second move. As much as I loved the office we finally settled into, it was a huge and unnecessary distraction. The first move was complicated to say the least.
Friday, January 21. 2011INS: A Post-Mortem
Quoth the original post: "My one concern is that this not turn into an attack post on You-Know-Who." Come on, MG, I'm a Harry Potter hater, and even I know we're supposed to call him 'Tom Riddle'...
More seriously, here are some of my thoughts - please don't take these as attacks on "Mr. Riddle", they're just a frank interpretation of events through the lens of my own experience. This is only the first half of the entry, discussing some of the things that "went wrong" - there's another half of an article in the works about the things that "went right", but I'm having more trouble finding the words for that half, so I'm pushing out this portion now. What DIDN'T workCash is KingWe had only one source of cash available for daily operations - an "angel" investor who was never *really* committed to the idea of investing in a company. He had to constantly be wheedled and re-converted, and even when he was "on board", his vision was NOT in line with the internal corporate culture. No external stakeholdersBecause the investor was not committed, there was no one to hold the CEO responsible. I'm starting to believe that a good start-up will have a couple of people with some skin in the game who are not employees of the company, so that there's someone who can sit outside the internal hubbub, but who has a stake in the success of the company. A Poor (or entirely missing) Definition of "Success"There were never any real numbers for measuring our success as a company. The CEO would pull a number out of thin air (or some less savory place) as needed to re-convert whomever he was talking to at the moment, but there was no serious market research done, and no firm business plan in place to define "Success" at the business level and chart progress towards it. Management often challenged published deadlines by responding with unrealistic expectations.The most striking example was in one of the early planning meetings for the mail service where I predicted it would take 6 months and Management insisted it could be done (far less). I have since found the correct response to this kind of insanity, and have effectively used it with my current employer. I look my boss right in the eye and ask, as seriously as I can manage: "Did you just bet against me on how SLOWLY I can write code?" Don't misunderstand me - I don't think Management should blindly accept all projections - but there are a couple of major problems with what happened in this particular meeting and deadlines at INS in general: a) The manner in which the projection was challenged amounted to "That's unacceptable" (the "angel" in fact used this exact phrase at least twice in response to my projections) - if you're going to challenge it, break down why, instead of just implying that you think you're being taken for a ride; b) We still hadn't even finished the DEFINITION of what the service would do, let alone start on an ARCHITECTURE; c) There were a LOT of unknowns in this project, and few of the people involved had very much experience solving the kinds of risks that were on the table (how many of us had ever even administered an email server before)? Use of Limited ResourcesWe were a small team, and when you're a start-up, momentum is *critical*, and we screwed this up in several ridiculous ways. “Moving Days”? We paid computer programmers to move and setup furniture, to hang whiteboards, and so on. I know a lot of you think I was just lazy and didn’t want to help move, but I had issues with this on the side of “I’m pretty sure most of us here make more in a day INDIVIDUALLY than hiring a mover. Is this REALLY THE BEST USE OF OUR MONEY?” And what about “Pellenor”? Splitting half your workforce to work on a different project would probably be enough to sink a company EVEN IF EVERYTHING ELSE WENT RIGHT. Boiling the OceanIn his excellent book "Start Small, Stay Small", Rob Walling suggests: I have a suggestion to help get you started: Strive to build a startup that generates $500 per month in profit. At INS, our every goal was on the degree of what is often called "boiling the ocean" - there were no goals set in the near term that would allow us to measure intermediate successes, evaluate progress, or even learn (as a company) the lessons of shipping/delivering a piece of code to users. This caused the investor to put increased pressure for completion of the completed product on the CEO, inciting the CEO to begin to look elsewhere for his personal sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, as well as to begin laying blame within the company. These two facts led to the employees feeling increased anxiety and unhappiness until it brought complete emotional burn-out, and the company collapsed. GMailHonestly, even if none of the above had happened at INS, I really think the death-knell would still have sounded the day GMail was announced. It it unclear to me how YKW couldn't see that this was the end of the line for Email Cop...when we started, we had a fairly good niche targeted, but GMail beat us to delivery and had superior features, superior resources, and superior back-end architecture. Had we met and determined a new company niche and overall strategy, perhaps the team could have outlived the death of the product idea - but in the face of all the other challenges listed above, it became an insurpassable burden. Trackbacks
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The Mad Giggler on :
I greatly regret the second move. As much as I loved the office we finally settled into, it was a huge and unnecessary distraction. The first move was complicated to say the least.
AoD on :
It's not so much the act of the moves themselves that I'm trying point out as I'm trying to use them as examples of how we really didn't carefully consider how we had our staff engaged. You could also point to things like running the network cables ourselves, "Dog and Pony shows" - there were just a lot of ways we failed that particular point.
The Mad Giggler on :
Ultimately, all those things went back to point #1 Cash is King. Our Angel Investor wasn't looking to build a successful startup. He was a bored rich guy looking to have some fun.
Radar on :
I know you are trying to summarize what a lot of people said but I really think that certain people should not have been hired (specifically me and Danny). The bad timeline issue obviously played a part in this but really my job wasn't essential to the project. Neither was marketing. Solidify the product and then you can write the help files or build the help system and market it.
AoD on :
Nope, not trying to summarize anything, this is my own list...although it does seem to have a lot in common with the email thread, I think that's just a natural growth out of the fact that we're all pretty smart people who experienced the same things.
I agree that you probably shouldn't have been hired so early on - however, I'm not sure I agree with your argument on marketing. There is a "Front End" to marketing which is market RESEARCH - that is, making sure there was an actual market for this other than the Angel Investor's buddies saying "Sure, I'd pay ONE HOJILLION DOLLARS for the perfect email solution..." I know there were SOME things done in that area, but they were done poorly and by the CEO - who was trying to make the facts fit the perception he wanted ("the company's existence is justified") instead of trying to find the truth of what was marketable. This would be where a full-time person in Marketing should have been spending their time, IMO. Radar on :
I agree with the sentiment. This is a subset of the "poor management" issue we all cited. I really have no idea what Danny did besides prepare for the dog and pony show and try to put a bit of a nice face on the team. I just was never truly part of his world to know.
The Mad Giggler on :
Danny did all the design for the product. He tried to come up with a different name as well. He came onboard fully motivated to be a good marketing guru. It was only after being squelched constantly that he gave up and started watching movie trailers all day.
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