If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?

For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.

Take it as a mental exercise.

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lelanthran 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Where did the story go sideways?

When they didn't iterate on PMF with a niche client.

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groundzeros2015 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of these things are just inexperienced management:

- not understanding sales and properly incentivizing them

- attacking only urgent problems (urgent vs important matrix)

- not taking constraints expressed by domain experts as real. (Big companies are actually good at this.)

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dijksterhuis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?

for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them.

i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessmen, big brain dev, co-founder etc. etc.

thank you for writing this. i'm still trying to come back from crashing and burning at that place. i might read this a few more times as it felt like my story too. the another Engineer part touched me. that's who i was in my story. it hurt.

edit -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774444 hits the nail on the head with their last bullet point. bad leadership innit.

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groundzeros2015 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> just how little research anyone actually did

More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality.

I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.

	▲	dijksterhuis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yeah i'd agree with you there with lack of experience. and that was definitely a thing at my place. i think it plays a part in the research stuff too. cos if without relevant experience a lot of bad assumptions get made. "FOSS is universally unreliable" was one of such assumptions i had to push back against 5 years later. they meant academica produced software. but they assumed all foss is the same as all academica produced software.