Comment by jeromec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeromec | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Jacques, it doesn't sound like you feel much that "Fred" basically stole a bunch of money from you. You explain that you didn't have a contract drawn up, and that Fred's justification for not sharing proceeds from the company sale was that, after all, it was his money invested. I'm sorry, but if money invested was the only determinant factor in a company's success VC's would simply produce hits every week. Also, you may still feel some misplaced guilt/responsibility/loyalty to that venture, even in hindsight, but to me, looking at it as an outsider, it appears you contributed around 80% of the overall value to that company. Even Fred wasn't delusional enough to believe the company wouldn't crash and burn without you. You also say Fred was the "driving force" of the company. Yeah, sure, but he was riding on top of you doing the driving. This was a great and graphic story, and I'm glad you choose to look at the benefits of knowledge you took away from it, but man, that Fred seems a real charlatan/a-hole.

I've tried (very) hard not to let my feelings (in so far as there are still smoldering embers about this) either current or remembered shine through and to depict things as objectively as possible.

Part of that is giving credit where credit is due. The vision was his, the implementation, and dealing with the fall-out of all the bad decisions in every way except monetary (he never missed a payment of the agreed upon monthly amount) was mine. All of us, also those that were brought in later worked quite hard.

There would not be much point in writing this in any other way, the only thing you'd get out of that is that I am either vindictive or that I still haven't come to terms with all this, 20 years after the fact.

I think I have come to terms with it, I see it as a very expensive but ultimately very useful lesson that I apparently needed to learn in order to do better.

I'm sure Fred worked hard enough, but I think you're being lenient and modest to compare his efforts to yours. It's unbelievable the level of technical prowess you pulled off 20 years ago, by yourself, on an ill-advised platform, working so many hours that your wife left you, for a minimum base salary and the promise of equity which was later disregarded. You know better than I do, of course, but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was.

> but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was.

That is probably true, at the same time he knew full well to sell when I announced my departure so he must have had some idea. The interesting thing is though, in retrospect, the 'ill advised platform' brought out the best in me in many ways, and I wonder if I had learned as much as I did had the platform been more powerful. There's nothing more satisfying than taking something that any sane person would say can not be done and then doing it anyway simply because nobody told you it couldn't be done.

I think of the whole thing as a character building exercise ;)

And I have learned to have great respect for the people that make industry work, the guys behind the lathes and the mills, the 'operators' that have more knowledge in their pinky about metal and metal working than most people will acquire in a life time of book knowledge.

They taught me more about feeds and speeds and materials than I ever wanted to know. And they also taught me that I'll never be a good machinist, even though I'm safe and can make what I want I just can't spend the lifetime on gaining all that knowledge.

One nice anecdote about that. One guy was complaining about the precision, this was in a factory of gears called 'Mak aandrijvingen', the guy told me while listening to the machine (in a factory full of noise at that) that it was running about 1/100th wide close to the chuck.

I thought he was pulling my leg, brought out the micrometer, sure enough 1/100th wide. We adjusted the table a tiny bit with to reduce the offset but overcompensated, during the next trial run he told me it had gotten worse, probably around 0.05 mm. Sure enough, the exact amount was very close to that. After that I started to slowly believe that this guy was so attuned to his machine that he could hear how much material it was taking off and as a consequence knew how much was left. When he finally said it was good it really was. By then I was a firm believer :)

Incredible.

Truly amazing. Reminds me of the anecdote about Jim Gray wherein he was able to figure out that the database was not tuned based on the the hard disk noise.

I've heard stories about Ted Williams - the last baseball player to hit .400. A shipment of new bats would arrive for the team. He would look them over and pick some out saying "These ones are 1/8th of an inch too short."

Thanks for sharing the story. I was thinking that maybe a good course of action would have been to find some guy like the one you mention here and see if they were interested in being beta testers/consultants in exchange for getting the machine for free.

My dad and I are kind of like you and that guy, by the way. He's the shop guy with no schooling but almost half a century of experience building stuff, and I'm the one who knows all the math and computer stuff... ;-)

Considering that "Fred" deliberately burned down a client's factory during payment negotiations, I think that "asshole" is quite an understatement.

"Fred" torched a factory. He's a criminal pure and simple. Not stealing from everyone around him would be a surprise.

I think you're missing the word 'allegedly' in there. The author claims that "Fred" claims that he torched a factory.

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