this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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My company 😢
This shit sucks. Some Silicon Valley shit company bought ours and they're closing us down after only half a year. Feels so unfair. Our company was doing well while theirs is going down the shitter with huge loans and promising the moon but delivering fuck all. Silicon Valley culture is toxic shit
Typical Private Equity deal... The buyers take a massive loan in the name of the company they are buying then they use the sudden massive interest payments to explain the declining profits and the need to downsize. Then they find a way to squirrel out of the loans claiming the company sucked and let banks take remaining assets (or losses) and maybe resell the intellectual property to someone else right before that.
So you mean that banks are dumb and give away money for free and then just take the losses and repeat thr process?
Actually banks take collateral that is normally not what the private equity firms target and that actually seems to work, but the consequence is that hard assets of the firm (offices, buildings, hardware, cash, etc) are essentially given up
so think of your company as a horse
you sell it to someone for a nice price thinking the other one wants to ride the horse just like you did. but they are actually a butcher and make horse sausage out of it.
Yes and it hurts.
They're not dumb; this is the "moral hazard" we were warned of during the 2008 GFC.
True, but we never expected that to happen with our company which was built on entirely different values. I am now committed never to let those vultures anywhere near a company I care about if I can help it, no matter their offer
Well, this is because it's access to Money that determines power, not actual merit.
That's the purest Capitalism you can think of and you see it at such an extreme level in present day Tech Startup Culture because nowadays it's basically the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance so it operates by the same principles of Finance - (I actually went from Investment Banking to Startups back in the UK a few years ago and for me it looked a lot like the Founder and Investor level culture of the latter was very similar to that in the wildest bits of the former). Back in the 90s Startups weren't quite like that, but nowadays it's different.
That kind of thing also operates at the people level: I've seen Startups with so-so ideas get jump-started with a couple of millions because mommy and daddy of a main founder are rich whilst ideas with a lot better legs to go places keep limping along unable to generate sufficient cash flow to takeoff or to get enough investment to do what's needed to generate more cash flow, until running out of founds.
What survives is either those with access to lots of no questions asked money upfront (which actually works because a well funded half-arsed idea can still triumph in the market over barelly funded good ideas) or those who manage to portray their stuff as paradygm-changing ("The next Google!!!") which why one sees incredible levels of bullshit in the Startup space and endless jumping on hype-trains (like, for example, anybody looking for funding now will be pitching "something-something-AI !!!")
Imagine how many brilliant innovations have been lost to the world because of this...
Here's a list from just one major company
I don't even know if that list would be a fair one because those are things we know were killed. We don't know how many unannounced or secret projects were killed that were basically completed.
Well "brilliant" may be a stretch for a lot of those...
My understanding is that these projects are a side-effect of how Google judges promotions. If you’ve “created a new product”, that puts you higher on the list to get promoted.
There are no incentives nor resources for maintaining those products. So you see a long list of “ideas” from Google that are abandoned immediately after someone got their promotion.