idea of the month
9 months ago
The craziest time in my life was at this startup I worked at for about a year and a half. When I got there, they just got an initial 1 million round of funding. The company goal seemed real clear and I was brought on to lead up the development of their software platform. For the first 2 months everything seemed okay, then we were notified that we just got another round of funding to help us build out more and faster, what had really happened was that we spent the million already. That was fine with me at the time as I was getting paid to work and just minding my own business, but then other things started happening. About every month, the ceo/founder would take the company in a totally different direction. So the product I was working on at the time was put on hold and we were told to start building a brand new product. This included all of the resources and personal of the company being redirected to work on the "new direction". At the time it seemed ok, people were thinking "we need to adapt dynamically to the market", but then it kept repeating itself over and over again. The company would be changing direction so often, that pretty soon, absolutely nothing was getting done. People would get concerned and ask the ceo for direction and guidance. The ceo would then tell everyone that they didn't understand, nor did they need to understand, and that we were about to have a break through and all become millionaires. That was the answer for a while, then people started challenging him by more asking questions, questioning whether the strategy made sense. He would have none of that though, he would tell anyone that challenged him that they were stupid and that they knew nothing. And all throughout this time, there were no customers and investors were still begin suckered into giving money, it was up to 7 million at the time I left. The employees would plead with him to make sense and not blow the company money away. We were spending money on things like doing $50,000 mailings to industry leaders to tell them of a product we didn't even have, we would do a complete rewrite of the website every few weeks, we even rented out multiple floors in the building we were in, in "preparation" of expansion (which were completely empty). After seeing this go on for a while, I came to the conclusion that the ceo had not a single clue of what he was doing, but he honestly thought he was doing it all perfectly. He would tell people that he was genius like Isaac Newton or Thomas Edison. Finally I got fed up and left, I don't know what happened to them after that, nor do I ever want to know. During my time there, I witnessed some of the stupidest things possible. I've read online about issues that startups have to deal with, but the problems we were dealing with were just so ridiculus, basic things like choosing a product, choosing a direction, choosing anything. It felt like the company would run into a wall everyday and bang its head, but the company would never learn, it just kept running into the wall. The only thing I can say I learned there is if you start a startup, don't be stupid, don't lie to yourself, are these even real lessons?
The craziest time in my life was at this startup I worked at for about a year and a half. When I got there, they just got an initial 1 million round of funding. The company goal seemed real clear and I was brought on to lead up the development of their software platform. For the first 2 months everything seemed okay, then we were notified that we just got another round of funding to help us build out more and faster, what had really happened was that we spent the million already. That was fine with me at the time as I was getting paid to work and just minding my own business, but then other things started happening. About every month, the ceo/founder would take the company in a totally different direction. So the product I was working on at the time was put on hold and we were told to start building a brand new product. This included all of the resources and personal of the company being redirected to work on the "new direction". At the time it seemed ok, people were thinking "we need to adapt dynamically to the market", but then it kept repeating itself over and over again. The company would be changing direction so often, that pretty soon, absolutely nothing was getting done. People would get concerned and ask the ceo for direction and guidance. The ceo would then tell everyone that they didn't understand, nor did they need to understand, and that we were about to have a break through and all become millionaires. That was the answer for a while, then people started challenging him by more asking questions, questioning whether the strategy made sense. He would have none of that though, he would tell anyone that challenged him that they were stupid and that they knew nothing. And all throughout this time, there were no customers and investors were still begin suckered into giving money, it was up to 7 million at the time I left. The employees would plead with him to make sense and not blow the company money away. We were spending money on things like doing $50,000 mailings to industry leaders to tell them of a product we didn't even have, we would do a complete rewrite of the website every few weeks, we even rented out multiple floors in the building we were in, in "preparation" of expansion (which were completely empty). After seeing this go on for a while, I came to the conclusion that the ceo had not a single clue of what he was doing, but he honestly thought he was doing it all perfectly. He would tell people that he was genius like Isaac Newton or Thomas Edison. Finally I got fed up and left, I don't know what happened to them after that, nor do I ever want to know. During my time there, I witnessed some of the stupidest things possible. I've read online about issues that startups have to deal with, but the problems we were dealing with were just so ridiculus, basic things like choosing a product, choosing a direction, choosing anything. It felt like the company would run into a wall everyday and bang its head, but the company would never learn, it just kept running into the wall. The only thing I can say I learned there is if you start a startup, don't be stupid, don't lie to yourself, are these even real lessons?