"Jungle Dave", Founder of Jungle Disk, Leaves(blog.jungledisk.com)
blog.jungledisk.com
"Jungle Dave", Founder of Jungle Disk, Leaves
http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/12/31/holiday-wishes-and-a-message-from-jungle-dave/
3 comments
I guess he had a one year retention contract.
fwiw, I didn't have a contract - I could have left at any time. I stayed because I really enjoyed working at Rackspace, which is a great company. Leaving was a very difficult decision but I felt the team and product were more than able to carry on without me.
I'd love for someone to keep track of how long founders stay at their acquirer. Anyone know if this data exists for technology acquisitions?
I bet on average it's just a little bit past the end of the contract, for contracts that are > 6mos.
If it's the kind of company that people don't leave, they might not specify a long contract.
I also suspect it has to do with what kind of leadership the founders have after they are acquired. It's very, very tough to go from a founder that runs a company to being eight down from the acquiring CEO and having every decision triple-guessed by middle managers. (I'm increasingly a believer in that ribbonfarm article about corporate structures. Using his jargon: someone who was once a Sociopath has to report to a Clueless.)
If it's the kind of company that people don't leave, they might not specify a long contract.
I also suspect it has to do with what kind of leadership the founders have after they are acquired. It's very, very tough to go from a founder that runs a company to being eight down from the acquiring CEO and having every decision triple-guessed by middle managers. (I'm increasingly a believer in that ribbonfarm article about corporate structures. Using his jargon: someone who was once a Sociopath has to report to a Clueless.)
I bet rackspace isn't happy about this. They need a lot of help with scalability problems.
Jungle Dave might have great insights into scalability issues, but I don't see how creating Jungle Disk required any scalability knowledge at all. Amazon handled scale-out. JungleDisk is a nice abstraction layer over S3. Perhaps their server-side augmentation stuff (public web view of files, etc.) required some scale-out?