I am curious what you find enraging about this article.
He clearly didn't want to go join another company – he joined Mapbox because he shared its early vision, and thought that original vision was worth fighting for.
He provides no ideas that would help the company succeed and find profitability. Only vague mention of returning to open source and that focusing on cars is bad because it bad for the environment.
The company raised a huge amount of cash and needs to make money to survive. The mistake was probably raising too much money.
So somehow, he thinks that the projects his colleagues „believe in“ are going to be more profitable than what they are currently working on. Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
And it’s important to note that while they raised and spent a huge amount of money, they sucked up all the talent and probably prevented other competitors from emerging in the space. So we shouldn’t feel so sorry for them. They were privileged to have so much money available to them when others didn’t.
But I won’t lie, it’s always nice to have VC money dumped into open source work while it lasts.
> He provides no ideas that would help the company succeed and find profitability. Only vague mention of returning to open source and that focusing on cars is bad because it bad for the environment.
That doesn't strike me as the point of the blog post. He's not trying to tell us all the things he would have done differently, he's telling us what went wrong and why he left.
He does go into his anti-car personal views a bit much, but he also suggests that focusing on auto tech is a dead end because Google and Apple dominate that for the mapping space. Is he wrong?
> Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
If things are going downhill, isn't it more naive to believe that the current people overseeing that have the right idea?
The company raised a huge amount of cash and needs to make money to survive. The mistake was probably raising too much money.
So somehow, he thinks that the projects his colleagues „believe in“ are going to be more profitable than what they are currently working on. Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
And it’s important to note that while they raised and spent a huge amount of money, they sucked up all the talent and probably prevented other competitors from emerging in the space. So we shouldn’t feel so sorry for them. They were privileged to have so much money available to them when others didn’t.
But I won’t lie, it’s always nice to have VC money dumped into open source work while it lasts.