Comment by waffleau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waffleau | Hacker News Reader

Coming from a startup background:

1. Senior people leaving (as has been said by pretty much everyone else in this thread).

2. Not having a clearly defined problem to solve, or a well understood target audience.

3. Not knowing who the competition are, or just dismissing them as "not being as amazing as us."

4. Little or no customer research - if you hear the phrase "customers don't know what they want" and it's not immediately followed by "so we need to do research and find out" - run.

5. Building solutions that don't really map back to problems. This can manifest in a lot of ways, but the most common ones I've seen: projects constantly changing in priority (entire projects materialise and become urgent overnight), features that are arbitrarily demanded, or in an over-emphasis on polish and minutia.

6. Departments not collaborating, things getting thrown over the fence. Workflows that move in the wrong direction.

7. Lack of autonomy - a handful of people make all of the decisions.

8. Micromanagement. People tend to micromanage when things aren't going well, which tends to make them worse. It's a downward spiral.

9. Being afraid to talk to management about problems; being chastised for suggesting ways to improve things.

10. When mistakes are made, focusing on blame rather than resolution and prevention.

I'm very familiar with #8. I worked for a company that was being super picky with its term sheets when looking for investment, but then suddenly the credit crunch happened and all our term sheets were withdrawn. Problem was, we were spending as if we'd already had an extra $15m in the bank, so we had to start cutting back.

I'd had a habit of coming in around 10 AM and staying most of the day and part of the late afternoon/evening; typical startup kind of 'go get lunch then come back and crank out some code' behaviour, while most of the rest of the dev team came in between 11 and 1. This includes one of our best developers, who, without downtime, ported an entire product from PHP to Rails on his own time over the weekend because the code was unmanageable and he wanted to be able to iterate faster.

Suddenly, after most of the most senior (and most expensive) people have left, the CEO decides that everyone needs to be in the office at 9 AM, you know, so we can communicate. Sure, okay. So people start coming in at 9 AM. They're tired, they haven't had breakfast, they only got 5 hours of sleep, but boss wants people filling seats so we fill them. I start getting phone calls at 9:03 if my bus is running late, because my buffer time was usually taken up by being in such a rush that I forgot my wallet.

So every day, everyone's tired, everyone's frustrated, and everyone's leaving after they've put their 8 hours in. My start date, when my options were priced, was the highest price the shares had ever traded at. But I was still one of the most well-paid engineers so I stayed until I got 'downsized' and took a month off.

Last I heard, the CEO was getting sued by the board for treating that company as a source of resources for his other company (like flights back to his other company's office, or my tech support to get his people up and running).

#10 struck me. I'm doing work for one guy that seems somewhat litigious and I'm afraid it might bring the startup down. There's no such thing as a solid contract with a bad person.

All great points. In my experience I have seen revenue losses followed by products/solutions which do map to the main objective of the company but in reality is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Example having billing of $1 million MRR but then releasing products with $15-20k MRR. So essentially the management is out of ideas on how to make up the revenue losses.

Pretty much.

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