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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
It sounded from your original article like you were a director, in the UK I believe directors have personal legal responsibilities to ensure that the company is solvent. Without access to the accounts I would resign as a director even if I stayed as a technical lead or at least would get individual legal advice.
I'm sure that you will much wiser next time, I just want to help you maximise the benefit and was focused on an unambiguous red flag rather than the harder to spot issue of convincing people who shouldn't be trusted (and/or are out of their depth).
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.
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.