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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

So the team consists of ( http://deep.is/our-invention/ ):

  1 CEO
  1 CTO
  3 Founders
  1 Chairman
  1 VP Product Management
  1 VP Sales
  1 Controller
  1 Director of Engineering
  1 Architect
  1 Consultant
  2 Engineers

Yeah... sounds like exactly the company i would never buy from. A company which basically consistes of 80% "upper management" positions and barely any "real workers".. Especially when the website is only about marketing claims and very unspecific details. I can't even find downloads or documenation..

No, i'll stay away.

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Those bios are a bit strange. They all manage to fill multiple paragraphs without actually saying anything relevant about themselves. Instead it's just strings of empty phrases like "I make magic happen" or "my DNA pushes me to always seek out the vanguard of technology". (Your DNA, really? Did one of your ancestors invent fire?)

To read the real bios, you need to click through to the people's LinkedIn profiles. This reveals that the founders come from companies like Oracle. I don't know if that explains anything.

CTO is a professor at UNH, Chief Scientist is from UNH and used to work at Virtual Iron which was acquired by Oracle, then he worked at Akiban until they were acquired. It appears some of their patents (http://www.google.com/patents/US20130290243, http://www.google.com/patents/US20130254208, http://www.google.com/patents/US20130226931) were assigned to Cloudtree Inc., which appears to have originally been something totally different but with what seems to be the same team: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/02/st...

I'm puzzled.

VirtualIron was a huge disaster of a company - they pivoted multiple times without ever finding market fit, then pissed off potential acquirers with their attitude, after which they laid everyone off and sold the remains to Oracle for a pittance ( I remember hearing it was ~$10m).

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/with-virtual-iron-o...

Virtually outsourced engineering as well -- a separate "corporate office" and "engineering office" in two different states, with the business people and founders working at the corporate one.

Those kind of companies nearly always fail. Engineering feels like the engine room on the Titanic, C levels escaping with lucre while the boilers are stoked.

You need all of the senior folks to manage the two engineers and tell them what to do and subtly deflect criticism towards them when things go wrong. Is it not the case that the business folks are entitled to and have the right to the fruits of the engineers' hard work?

To be fair, all of their team except one come from technical backgrounds. There are three other engineers (Michael Jeffords - CTO's relative?, Vincent King and Richard Soczewinski) listed as employees on LinkedIn. That puts the split at 10:6, which looks healthy. I'd be more worried about the lack of information and the fairy tales on the product's website.

10:6 is healthy in your world? Ok.....

That does not mean 6 managers for 10 developers. That would be ridiculous.

If I can't download at least a demo, let alone the source it will take a lot of convincing to get me to use something.

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