| Lack of vision. Inability to make hard decisions due to lack of interest and engagement in company’s domain, market, and customers from the corp team. Hiring people that didn’t fit into the companies values. Just hiring anyone you could… Not actually defining the values… Long story: I was the CTO and we were doing well. I had a strong vision of how the company and market operated. My work accounted for the lions share of the company’s revenue. Nevertheless, the COO ended up becoming the CEO. It seemed like a good idea at the time: nerds like me at the company all wanted to remain technical! Let this other businessy person we trust run things and keep the lights on. Big mistake. Several fundamental company decisions required ruthless leadership, but the CEO was strongly oriented towards consensus based decision making. Much of the time being consensus based is the right choice. But when it comes to fundamental questions of values and culture, you need someone who truly cares to lead with vision. One such area was “do we take the company in CTOs direction into X market” or “let’s just flounder around and do interesting stuff in a million directions”. I had my posse of incredible, very growth-oriented engineers that really believed in my vision and wanted to push the boundaries. But 2-3 more lifestyle company oriented people didn’t like us. We were providing the companies growth (monetarily and otherwise). the lifestyle folks were content, so they didn’t want to join up with us. They also complained (despite our growth numbers) that we had “all the fun”. That created a significant culture issue. Of course it escalated to the Corp team. Many times in many ways over a long stretch of time. The CEO could not resolve the issue whether we’re going to be a lifestyle company vs we’re going in this high growth direction. One or the other meant losing a lot of people. He always put it to the team for discussion and consensus. But fundamentally you were never going to get consensus on the issue. Furher the CEO wasnt engaged with customers, didn’t know the market or domain, and thus didn’t personally care which way thing went. This lack of decisiveness was deadly or the higher growth crowd (my crew), especially as we were micromanaged and told what to do/not do constantly by the CEO/Corp team the more others complained. We started to strongly feel like the CEO fundamentally didn’t get it. Instead they were trying to appease everyone. We were being punished for being the financial and marketing lifeblood of the company. That just destroyed our morale. In the end I got tired of dealing with it and left to greener pastures. As did many of the folks on my teams. Like I said, earlier on I should have fought to be CEO, and just committed to being far less technical. I should have kept the COO a COO (he’s really good at that) and made these fundamental values decisions myself. |