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.
- a holding where the cofounders owned shares as of 52, 30, 12 and 6 percent. This company had no business activity and no employee. I owned 6 percent of its 100K capital;
- a startup which was 100% owned by the holding, sharing the same CEO. I was employee and paid by this company (well, "paid"…).
I had a vote decision in the holding, not the startup.
And for some reason I had a reason not to work anymore for the startup (including being fired when we think about it), I would have to sell my shares. If you want to evict someone, this is a great system.
Also, the 12% shares were held by the spouse/partner of the CEO, creating a 50/50 balance which let all the power in his hands, whatever the scenario is.
That is a reason why fighting was useless. And making a viable platform was more a chance for us to get funded, to have an external observer who could eventually rectify the power balance.
I bet on people intelligence rather than their ignorance. I will eventually have to scale my explanations only if I remain for a too long time on the first page of HN ;-)
Actually this is the very first time I hear a comment about being nicknamed "Uncle Tom". So far in Europe it did not even started a single spark of debate.
If I appear to become a fashionable talent in North America I might consider changing the username to avoid controversy. At that stage I understand it can offend people.
Now is a bit prematured in my opinion.
Thanks for raising the issue, I would have not figured that on my own :-)
Interesting question, as it is a regular debate with the US/FR startup ecosystem.
Hiring is longer than harder: I already knew and contacted directly some of the engineers I wanted to hire. I also used GitHub and requested candidates to apply through a Pull Request (https://github.com/Dijiwan/Jobs).
I am not based in the US, and if I had to hire people there, I do not have enough step back to judge if I could have successfully operated the same way I did.
Most of all, the engineers hiring process was rather 1) an individual trust, 2) a cultural fit (we share the same values) than a "I want the most expensive guy on Earth". I value the individuality of people equally to their skills.
I think this is harder to achieve in a more money-driven environment.
Not being located in Paris but rather in a chilled out city like Bordeaux created an emphasis on the "we want to work and enjoy a good work/life balance". Working on the grass, at the coffee or a nap on the river bank while being able to have a 100% JavaScript codebase when it is your favourite language, this has no money equivalence ;-)
We had more problems with other roles, but I assume it is because we were not clear enough on the expectations and for the reasons explained in the blog post.
Hiring is a lot of paperwork. Firing is a lot of paperwork.
Jobs are sacralised in France and this is normal from an historical point of view: people fought for that. A lifetime full time job was the Nirvana of the Industrial Revolution.
Hiring someone should be a huge responsibility is most businesses: you not only deal with money but with individual's life. So you need to make sure you generate enough revenues to hire someone. It is an ethical debate, and cultural. I do respect individuals, whatever role they have in the company, and I want them to be able to be happy at doing it, even if it is not their dream job.
What was stupid on the business plan is the "hirings objective". They preferred us to hire 8 average engineers rather than 4 excellent ones. At a bootstrapping stage, I bet on reliability and efficiency. It is easier to scale conversations with 4 people rather than with 8.
What I think is wrong in the french public investment is they care too much about job figures and not enough about the company sustainability. Whereas I think in the US, investors care too much about the money and probably not enough about people (this is how I perceive it through the Internet lens, so certainly there is a bias in my opinion).
CEO are still perceived as bank robbers and slave masters. We like national companies to succeed but we hate so much people earning money. Maybe because there is an unfair wages balance between "high value" profiles and other people.
I wish it could be easier to be trained at creating companies, to be promoted and to be educated at creating a successful business. For this, I think US are way better than us. To market and to define a product as well, the US are far better than us.
We did not more money: we needed to make more money. We might have needed more money in the US, simply to scale with the salaries expectations (and to provide benefits, which are provided by the government here in France through the tax payer system; it linearise the cost over the entire country rather than creating an auction system for equal benefits coverage).
The failure we had was human: wrong persons at the wrong place making wrong decisions (including myself, except I think I did my leading job well; the cofounder one has been my weakness).
The failure we had was a product design: we had a super powerful tool and we did not know how to sell it, and we had the wrong persons to sell it.
We were pretty lucky (and probably worth it) to get that much funding. It took us one year (a year you have to fund on your own because you need to pay your bills meanwhile) to get it anyway. And investors have been fooled by some of the founders as we did.
So no, I do not believe the french system helped: we had access to free legal support.
The only lie we discovered is a continuing contract in France does not protect that much when your employer is not able to pay you. In that case, you are prisoner of a system rather than protected by it. This is wrong.
I do not know if it provides all the details you expected to have, so feel free to question me more about that :-)
Oh I understand better the critique now: yes it is my personal blog (the initial startup website does not exist anymore). I refreshed the design recently (like, 2 weeks ago).
I used http://lamb.cc/typograph/ with a "Le Corbusier" scale to calculate the font size, the paddings and margins etc.
So the size does not come out nowhere, it has been made for readability and as my eyesight decreased, I found the change much welcome… I will try to find a good balance to end up your sufferings ;-)
Yep you are right, this is part of the wrong income/outcome balance. The Head of marketing said she could not handle the load so we needed to hire someone else. We were mitigated about that.
The hiring has been made against our will, and we could not prevent it to happen (again, 52% shares by the CEO, all the power in a unique pair of hands etc.)
The number of analysts is wrong as well: especially when you lack of customers. Hirings have been made in case of signing the huge contracts in the process of being signed.
An attempt to scale too early, with blurry indicators which made us thinking we eventually needed them.
Anyway, considering how much money was burnt every months, it would not have saved us much more than 1 or 2 extra months.
We agree this should be the case. And eventually bank account reports should be available to anyone in the company as long as the details do not create a possible business threat.
On the other hand, I requested the account details but never got access to them. What do you do when you insist and get nothing? At some point you stop asking.
Considering the structure we had in the company, I am not sure there were legal obligations for the company to deliver the accountancy reports. If the CFO and CEO do not want to share the information… I never found a legal way to oblige them to do so. The CEO owned 52% of the company. Aka `root` access to the machine.
Maybe I am wrong on that part, feel free to add anything I have missed (I do not pretend to know everything, I just wish I would have know all that sooner).
The top salaries were roughly 3K€ per month. Officially and speaking for myself. Without the detailed accountancy we can only speculate about it.
We built a working software using Node.js and Chrome Extensions in less than 3 months, to reach that second stage of funding.
As our baseline was not clear, our market not proven and probably because of the investors suspicions, we never got an answer (well he had: "we'll see later").
I forgot to mention this product was based on scientific research about graph theories and user behaviours in an established society.
From science to market, another challenge as one needs to distinguish the scientific interest of a feature vs. a sellable feature on a business market.
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 ;-)
Yep that was not the point I wanted to express (what did the company do). I shallowly explained it as well: we hardly described our own product, making it difficult to read from a market perspective.
As a sentence: Web opinions miner and network of influences analyser.
As an example: national market study on insurances based on expressed opinions on the Web, collected in two days, classified and weighted on various criteria relative to the business requesting the study.
Well, "Oncle" translates as "Uncle" and Thomas is my first name. It is a French pun I chose 10 years ago; and I definitely not meant to promote slavery or whatsoever. I am more a humanist kind of person.
Sadly at the time I missed the point it could eventually be pejorative in North America (and probably elsewhere). Especially as the book is about getting access to freedom through hard work. A beautiful outcome.
"Oncle Tom" sounds friendly and familiar in French. You could read it as "Bro Tom", a guy you can speak and what with easily.
The header picture is a picture of mine depicting a french fisherman graveyard located in Iceland. While the company was heading to its own graveyard, I was visiting one. This is how to read it.
> https://www.flickr.com/photos/the-jedi/8468239532/
Hey guys these are excellent feedbacks! I discovered too late this behaviour was typical, and you confirm it even more… I wish we had sought this kind of trustful insights beforehand.
We actually thought our lawyer was helping us but you know, he was a "close friend" with the CEO so the game rules were a bit faked.
Yep you are right for the snark. Still, "valid point" is very subjective. I'll think about it, yet I do not have any improvement in mind to preserve space, breathing and readability.
The process has been initiated way before (a year before actually). It took 4 months to get the money because the business plan and everything has been made for the company launch.
Think of:
1. 2010: the project initiated with the preparation of the business plan with public funding in mind;
2. september 2011: the company launched because the funding project has been audited and validated, which means 99% chances for the funding to be approved;
I think this is tight to the personality of the guys allowing the expenses. In that case, the "I want to make sure you don't need my money" investor advice makes a lot of sense: they want to make sure your head is not going to burn because of the euphoria effect. Yesterday you had 0, today you have millions.
On another scale, you have people unable to manage a daily budget. This is the same on a (wrong) business scale.
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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.