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ArsDigita CEO & VCs Sue Philip Greenspun
RM writes "ArsDigita, its CEO Allan Shaheen and the venture capitalists who took over ArsDigita Corp., the company that had everything to be the coolest company on earth, are sueing Philip Greenspun and two other co-founders of ArsDigita (Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams). The lawsuit was mentioned in this post to Philip Greenspun's site. Since the VCs took over ArsDigita, many of their best developers and staff have left the company or been fired, and now they are sueing their own co-founders, who gave the company its vision (which seems to be going down the tubes) and the profitability it always had. Sad, really sad."
You can get the Apache version here: http://openacs.org/software.adp Nothing wrong with AOLServer. Its a kickass multi-threaded, exceptionally stable and fast, daemon that's built to support HUGE amounts of traffic. I'll tell you a secret, its also a really a blazing fast database client (modular to support different databases). Best of all, its written in TCL (don't get confused with TCL/Tk, there's no Tk in it). What easier, and flexible, language could you ask for? Of course, if you want to do something in a different language, it supports that as well (how generous!). If its the name your offended by, then soon you can try this version instead: http://www.opennsd.org/ Here is a fuller description of what an older version is all about.. AOLserver is a World Wide Web server, part of an integrated client/server system you can use to create, publish, and manage information on the World Wide Web. AOLserver is extendable with both C and Tcl APIs that expose core functions and provide primitives for accessing the database. AOLserver also provides full CGI support, although the C and Tcl APIs are more powerful. Multiple virtual servers can be running within one AOLserver installation. You can configure each virtual server individually. AOLserver also uses a multi-threaded design on all supported platforms. You can configure the number of threads each virtual server can use. AOLserver offers direct connections to SQL databases such as Illustra and ODBC databases (on Windows NT), plus external database connections to Illustra and Sybase. You can even configure AOLserver to have connections to multiple databases and specify which databases are available to each virtual server. A simple forms-based interface allows you to create, extend, and drop database tables. AOLserver automatically generates Entry, Search, and Update forms for each table in the database so you can manipulate the data as well. These automatically-generated forms can be customized and used in your own Web applications. AOLserver supports network saving of pages..blah, blah, blah.. Geez what ELSE could you ask for?
He was personally insulting to me personally
And thus I must bad mouth him anonymously on slashdot anonymously.
First of all, I'm a coward and rather not reveal my name. Secondly, as an ex-arsdigita employee, anonymous coward #1 CLEARLY did NOT have even the faintest idea of what arsdigita employees felt like when rumors of philip being pushed out of the company came out and became true. a lot of people -- though probably not enough -- came to work for aD not for the 100k/yr salary or the aaron miller chairs. we came because of philip's ideas. we came because we wanted to work with the brightest, do honest, responsible work, and improve the web. money was a nice little bonus. and people were very upset when the whole soap opera began and aD started changing. but who cared about what the employees thought? yes, philip has an ego. but IMHO, it only clashed with people whose own egos are so huge that they can't handle someone who's smarter and better than them and make no apologies about the fact that he is. i've known philip for over a year and though never worked together too closely, he never offended me. i actually thought he was one of the best exec/teacher i've ever had, more encouraging of employee participation and more caring and employee's personal achievement and growth than allen shaheen and his lackeys have ever even attempted to be. philip sent out a survey a couple of months ago to the company asking everyone what they thought of the company and what % they think they're achieving relative to their personal best. did the new management ever cared so much as to ask that??? arsdigita use to be a haven for people who didn't care about politics or fancy marketing words and just wanted to work hard and do interesting stuff. arsdigita use to represent a lifestyle -- you work hard, you make a lot of money, and you give back to the community that support you, through improving ACS constantly and through aD foundation. arsdigita now is everything but that, with the new logo and dave menninger and allen shaheen actually explain at a company-wide meeting exactly what each employee should SAY when asked about arsdigita -- how to weave the "open for ebusiness" bullshit logo into the sales pitch. how embarassing.
More uniformed stupidity. Philip is a very competent PR guy, a semi-competent engineer and a completely incompetent manager, whatever you want to believe. His appeal is mainly to brain-dead types such as yourself, who want to worship a stong personality. The same sort of person who joins a cult, which is what AD resembled when Philip was here. Writing a book that claims you know something about scalability does not in fact mean you know anything about scalability. Taking a bunch of money from free-spending dot-coms during the bubble and using it to hire a couple hundred people doesn't constitute "building a company." Not only haven't the best engineers quit AD, but NO COMPETENT ENGINEER has ever quit, other than Philip's lackey, Jin. If you took a poll around here, you'd find it about 180-2 in favor of the current management over Philip.
It would be pretty hard to "leave Philip alone" when he's attempted to rearrange the board in direct contradiction to what he agreed to in exchange for $35 million. The sureness of opinion in this thread is pretty amazing considering the lack of knowledge. Philip complained that the process of pushing him out of the company seems to have begun "before the ink was dry" on the VC check. Might this perhaps be related to the fact that, before the ink was dry on the VC check, he announced he was going to spend $3 million of it on a house on Cape Cod? Of the 200+ AD employees, I know of only three that were upset when he was finally pushed out: his girlfriend Eve and his close friends/lackeys Tracy and Jin. The relief throughout the rest of the company was palpable. He may have some interesting ideas, but as a manager, the man is a walking disaster. Worse yet, he's a walking disaster who somehow seems to have gotten the impression he's God's gift to management, related to the fact that he think's he's God's gift to just about everything. Aside from spending money like a drunken sailor, Philip's ego destroyed his relationship with just about everyone at the company, manager and engineer alike. He was personally insulting to me personally, as well as everyone else at one time or another. The agreement with the VC's was that Philip would assume a role as visionary and strategist as chairman and AD would hire an experienced executive to run the company as CEO. This is what happened, but Philip found himself completely unable to let go. He interfered in the operation of the company and created confusion and frustration for everyone. After six months of this, he simply had to go.
A million bucks doesn't get you much in the software world. You've got to hire project managers, programmers, architects, UI folks, QA people, support people, etc... Good software is very expensive; I work for a company that builds and supports software that we sell for millions of bucks at a time.
This is how I understand the situation, from what I've heard -- ArsDigita was profitable before they had a bunch of large VC companies come in. The decided to raise a lot of capital so that they would be able to hire much more staff and take on a lot more clients. The problem is that after they did this, after the dot-com slowdown, the new clients never materialized, and ArsDigita was left with having sold off part of their company and an overgrown staff that wasn't producing revenue, which is why they had to lay people off.
In addition, people have said that ArsDigita University (the free computer science school) had been established with money that the venture capitalists had given ArsDigita. Needless to say, they were probably a bit upset by this.
So, the question on my mind was this-- if ArsDigita was always profitable, why did they raise all that VC and over-expand? Were they getting greedy or what?
-Dean
"Consulting is a very profitable business"
Maybe you haven't noticed, but we are now in the New New Economy.
Consulting was profitable for Y2K, and it's scaled back considerably since then.
At least in my city, Minneapolis, every since consulting company has been laying off people. Norstan, Born, Ranier, etc. etc. etc.
Even the large global companies are laying off, the most recent I saw was Price Waterhouse Coopers.
I became familiar with Philip Greenspun several years ago when he posted a story to rec.autos.misc about his suing a Ford dealership over some purchase of his.
He's got an ego, he definately has an attitude. He strikes me as someone who enjoys getting attention on the Internet, but not as someone whom I would like to work for or with.
It would be pretty hard to "leave Philip alone" when he's attempted to rearrange the board in direct contradiction to what he agreed to in exchange for $35 million.
At the time of writing, I didn't know this. It seemed like they were just suing him for good measure after pushing him, and I didn't like this. Now I know a bit more.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Like others, I've been wondering what this is about. I've read a bit of the documentation referred to on Philip's site, and it seems to be that ArsDigita and the VC's are suing Philip, Eve Andersson, and Tracy Adams because they think that a 'stockholders agreement' has been violated.
They think that the way this has been violated is because Philip, Eve, and Tracy have (according to this new money grubbing bunch of VC's), been claiming that they (or perhaps others) are working for the company as an officer or director, and that there are two sets of individuals that say that they run the company.
Why Arsdigita can't just give up and leave poor Philip and friends alone after completely screwing up everything is beyond me.
If it weren't for lawyers, we wouldn't need more lawyers.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Hopefully he comes out Ok. I mean I have never met him, but anyone that makes something as cool as photo.net is allright in my book. Plus he seems pretty cool from what I can tell by reading his tutorials and such...
I think someone needs to learn how to use English
;)
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
#
use strict;
use English;
print STDOUT $PROCESS_ID . "\n";
Or do a perldoc English and read the bugs section.. "If performance matters, consider avoiding English".. Sounds like a motto for Quebecois
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Tell her that you translate English step-by-step instructions to computer-ese. When you boil it down, that's what programming is: you figure out what you want to do, figure out the steps to get you there, then translate your steps into $FAVORITELANGUAGE.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I've been a fan of Philip's writing for several years now, starting with Travel's with Samantha, and I'd like to stand up for his side a bit.
From what I've read from Philip, he'll be the first to agree with you about his not being a capable SW engineering god, SW architect or manager. He is, however, a guy who had a vision on how the Web could benefit people and worked to make that vision a reality in photo.net, with the assistance of his (more competant and qualified, he'll readily admit I think, friends). He took that core and built a company doing what no other dot-com was doing -- return a real profit.
Now there's a power struggle at the top. This is a side effect of bad planning, fast growth, and being a beautiful woman (i.e. a company with lots of revenue and real profits), and unavoidable in business. What did the Japanese say? Business is war? Very true -- business, like war, is a great asshole magnet, and as the dust flies around everybody loses sight of who is the asshole and who isn't. Wildly pointing fingers results in nothing.
I don't claim to know Philip intimately, I can only talk to the impressions I get from his writings and from the handful of emails I've traded with him. I think I can understand his desire to regain control of what he still sees as "his" company -- I've watched the aD web site degenerate over time from a honest, informative site to an overblown, marketeered, PR-driven blandness that I don't visit anymore (I go straight to developers.arsdigita.com now) Philip wants things to be the same as they were in the beginning (which, unfortunately, they can never be once you accept that check from outside investors), and he's going to give it the old college try.
While you might find his writings a lot of "hand-waving", I think you (and the "capable software engineers" you mention) might need to get out in the air more often. To my mind, one of the biggest problems we have is the fact that software engineers are running things, either covertly or not-so-covertly, and to have someone with an ability to bridge that gap between management and techs is *extremely* valuable. I'm sure aD has plenty of "software engineers***" -- have you got any usibility experts on staff? Interaction designers? Someone who cares more about the end user than the server? Until you have that, you're a programming shop, and no force on earth is capable of "managing" a crowd of programmers. At best you can get all of their heads pointed in the right direction
*** Software engineers... pah! My dad is an electrical engineer (>5V). My girlfriend's dad is a civil engineer. I've got a cousin in aerospace engineering, an uncle with a PhD in electrical engineering(<=5V), and a good friend in mechanical engineering. They have codes, rules, guidelines to keep their stuff running, powered, in the air or out of the muck, and ultimately their stuff either works or it doesn't.
Software engineer... you're a fucking programmer, so get over it or accept (financial) responsibility when my word processor crashes.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
God YES! I would! The thing is, I'm paying NOW for crappy quality (well, sort of -- I pay for Photoshop and Illustrator, which are really pretty good, but MS Office 98 implodes all the time) -- why should anybody go to that extra effort?
So we'll just call ourselves "Software Engineers" and pretend we do engineering things, and we get paid the same regardless.
And above and beyond the lack of "crashiness", a REAL "software engineer" is held responsible for appropriateness of design, i.e. if you're a bridge builder and the client wants a narrow, graceful bridge that's unsafe and you provide it, and the thing sinks into the bay, the bridge builder is held accountable because HE SHOULD KNOW BETTER.
I don't know any programmers willing to take that responsibility on.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Apropos of nothing, when I was a wee lad, that's what I thought my dad did.
But even your example is a good one for me. If a train engineer operated like a "software engineer", every time a train derailed because he was drunk on the job, he'd blame Microsoft and wouldn't be held accountable.
Programmers call themselves "software engineers" because they are trying to ascribe to themselves qualities that do not exist -- i.e. standards and practices and such that work to guarantee quality, and a professional image overall. A "programmer" is that nerdy guy you knew in high school who got his head flushed twice a week.
I don't think you want to see how much I'm going to charge you for your new Professionally Engineered Word Processor!
Software isn't like a building. You only build a building once, but software costs are spread over a HUGE number of people. It costs you $1,000,000 to make properly engineered software? Fine -- I just need 100,000 people to pay $20, and you make a millon dollars profit.
I just don't like people who ride on the coat tails of REAL engineers for pure marketing reasons. I won't let you claim to be a "software engineer" any more than I'll let a garbage man be a "sanitation engineer".
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
...I just like the concept of "conculting"
Just junk food for thought...
I first saw Phil on the net at his popular "Bill Gates Wealth" website. Besides website development he does a fair amount with photography and travelogues.
The biggest disadvantage (IMHO) is that it requires AOLServer. Using the apache web server is not an option. That squelched my interest in it real quick.
bp
Geez what ELSE could you ask for?
mod_perl? mod_rewrite?
AOLserver may be great, but apache happens to be what I know. I use apache-specific features, and I'd need to figure out how to get them to work in AOLserver. Or run both, having AOLserver on a different host or port. All in all, I decided that the tradeoff (what I'd gain with aD versus what I'd lose in time, maintenance, or functionality) just wasn't worth it. YMMV.
bp
You complain that the ACS source is useless because nobody but aD insiders knows how to use it anyway.
Linux is in exactly the same boat. I bet less than 0.01% of all Slashdot readers have sufficient familiarity to make nontrivial modifications to the Linux kernel, let alone have ever tried. I'll be the first to admit I've never edited more than some basic numeric constants, and added one measly hook to a device driver that a vendor provided.
The point of Open/Free software is not, and never has been, that source availability is useful to all customers. Just that it's there for you if you ever need it. The rest is up to you.
Apple Computer
I got the impression that aD was having trouble landing good contracts and growing their business because clients wanted aD to be backed be strong venture partners and experienced management, regardless of their immediate profitability.
Also keep in mind that people who are great at starting companies are not always great at running them. And vice-versa. Just something to chew on.
If you don't feel like you can talk about internal ArsDigita business (even though you've already started) how about pointing out some of the flaws in Greenspun's writing? In another post you asserted that they were mere "handwaving"... how about pointing out one or two of the places that are lacking?
I can't figure out why this is such a big deal with you guys... "my god, he recommends buying Aerons! You see, what a spendthrift!".
Well, what he appears to be doing is trying to justify to managers, from a managers perspective, why he thinks they should treat they're engineers really well. This doesn't strike me as being all that nefarious, nor does it seem so grossly unfounded as to shrug it off as "handwaving". It's not like people management is an exact science... don't expect too many differential equations when you're reading management text books.Looking at the rest of the article, there are actually a number of things in it that really should be obvious, common sense, but really aren't always attended to. The place where I'm working right now, the landlord turns off the HVAC at 6pm sharp. By 7pm or so it's getting so hot and stuffy I can't breath. This being a moderne office building, there ain't no windows I can open. You would think it would be in their interests to make it easy for me to hang out until midnight, but somehow they can't get their act together on the simple stuff like this.
Anyway, I'll skip the rest of your rant... you may have some points in there, but it looks to me like there's a lot of hand-waving going on about Philips hand-waving...
Like look at what wuliao was saying originally:
What actually staggers me is the amount of anti-Greenspun vitriol that doesn't seem to have any solid foundation behind it, at least not that anyone can put into words. What is it that inspires this kind of empty, free floating disgust? You'd think we were talking about Harlan Ellsion.--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
These are actually nice people. They once wasted $1000 on sending me to boot camp.
He owns around 65% of the company.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-202-5522429.html
..."
... my services as a full-time employee of ArsDigita Corporation became unwanted."
"ArsDigita, an e-commerce company in the midst of layoffs and a major product overhaul, is bucking the trend of comrades selling open-source software.... The company laid off 29 employees in the last week, and the company's founder and former chairman, Philip Greenspun, has left to pursue other interests
Note that the story quotes a current executive as saying Greenspun's departure was voluntary; Greenspun says, "last fall
This page at the ArsDigita site still lists Greenspun as chairman. I guess it's too much for a Web content company to correctly list its chairman in its own Web content?-)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
It would seem to me that a "monolithic conglomerate" is an oxymoron.
I took the 2 week boot camp this year (they didn't seem to offer longer ones anymore). It was free and although they didn't "teach" much per-say, you learned alot and there were people floating around to ask questions. All the material for the courses is on the web.
The problem is that most people dropped out after the first week with only 7 or so continuing. The equipment used was excellent, flat panels, aerochairs.
They also have an open source version of the ACS which is the product that allows them to put together web sites quickly using reusable components. The problem is that ACS is written in TCL which is easy enough to learn but with CPAN and PHP-PEAR others have already built reusable components so it seems Ars doesn't have
the advantage that it had before. I notice they were porting there product to servlets/JSP on there web site.
With the general slowdown on the internet, they don't stand to make as much money as expected. A lot of times when companies underperform they get sued. I don't know the details so I won't comment except that investors used to know investing involed risk, not mater what people predicted for the company...
I wish Philip and crew the best of luck.
Then VCs got hold of the company and look at it now.. they simply dont understand what made the company successful.
I'm sorry Philip. :(
-henrik
.... is are Phil and Eve still an "item" ? He's in London, she's back at work. Yikes!
If you hoof on over to the arsdigita discussion page, linked in the story summary, you can read where Phil is going - back to his R&D roots. I've been reading the recent voice-xml stuff from aD, and I think, once again, he's bang on the money. (or maybe that's the wrong phrase now, but he's, as usual, on target to something that is fundamentally correct and insightful). I look forward to the next incarnation of PG.
Hmm.... Venture capitalists suing company founders.... Didn't that account for a few chapters in Cryptonomicon?
--
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III / NIC Handle: EMC3
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III
geek ramblings
oh yeah filthy money-grubbing greed!
why didn't i think of that.
There is more information here, including some of the court materials.
Maybe you're right. I don't work there. But answer these questions:
Why has the company been silent about this? Why wasn't the community told for nearly 6 months that Philip was gone? Why weren't we told that he'd been forced out? Why was the community so upset when they found out he'd been forced out (see: the "Where's Philip" bboard thread)?
Why do none of you vaunted "software engineers" post on the bboards? Why don't you interact with the community? If you look at the statistics for the bboards, you'll notice that the largest number of posts are from old developers who have since left the company. Why did they leave? Does ArsDigita's changed outlook have anything to do with it?
Why doesn't your company show any support for the community of software developers which has grown up around your product?
Why is your company's website full of crap? Why are your IT programmers so pathetically weak that your pages learn what section of the website they are in via GET variables instead of from a database? Why does your site show no concern for Human Computer Interface? Why did I have to beg one of your web programmers to add a link to the bboards on the front page?
Maybe the if you answer some of these questions, you'll notice a patern -- external developers (like, say, me) were drawn to your company's product by a VISION. And that vision was not "Open for E-Business" (which has to be the most vacuously stupid motto I've ever heard...how much did your management pay for it?). That VISION was Philip's: that collaborative software could do a lot of good for the internet, and hey, maybe we could make some cash doing it.
Maybe Philip really is an asshole. I don't know, I haven't met him. But he had something that people liked, that people were drawn to. I think customers were, too. How many customers did ArsDigita get because of Philip's book? I know for a fact that the World Bank was drawn in by recommendation of someone who'd read the book. The new management does NOT have this, and they furthermore have NO idea how to support a developer community. External developers are money in the company's product (hello, they PROGRAM for FREE!), yet the company treats them like dirt.
In short: Maybe Philip's not the best manager, but the CEO massively fucked up by handling him like this. It seems to me that your company is screwed.
Move lawyers, for great profits!
I imagine the aD Prize will go on. The new management canceled it, but community pressure forced them to give out the Prize for one more year, at least.
Erm, which dot-coms were making billions a year ago? Which dot-coms were making any money at all a year ago? Of course some were, but I doubt any were making billions. What I think you meant to say is that the speculative bubble has burst, and people are no longer able to make money on share-price rises without actually turning any kind of profit. I guess that the people who either were taken in by the con or weren't, but didn't sell fast enough to walk away with cash, are feeling pretty bad just the same though.
Nuff said.
Area51 - We are watching...
Somebody please mod this up.
The other site is getting slashdotted.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Being 'famous' is equivelent to being respected by ones peers*, a much more honourable goal than simply stuffing your driveway full of SUVs and gold faucets for your sinks.
;)
People stuff their driveways with SUV's and assorted trinkets because overall it earns them a higher measure of respect from their peers. No offense, and I honestly wish that conditions weren't like this, but the only people living in "la la land" are the ones who don't yet recognize that the majority of people award values of respect according to the summation of some (superficially arbitrary and generally shared) series. Each person is assigned a value according to the sum of weights assigned by the perceiver to the "desirable" characteristics that the subject possesses. Each perceiver has an "n-dimensional criterion vector" in his/her head that he/she fills with measurements of your capacity in each category. That perceiver's own bias is applied by taking the dot product of your measurements with a vector of matching size (each component of this latter vector indicates the perceiver's preference for that particular trait: apathy at 0, severe dislike at very low numbers and severe like at very high numbers.) Once these two vectors are combined, the resultant vector is summed. The perceiver will then categorize you according to whatever threshold your summation has passed. This can be anything from disdain (those of you with high "nerd" marks among the perceivers with particularly large negative numbers in the corresponding component of the bias vector) to complete lust (those of you with the "beautiful" marks among the perceivers with particularly large positive numbers in the components that match your physical features.)
People don't necessarily think of it like that but it works for defining things like neural networks.
I know that this is off of the main subject, but it seems to be a very important topic. If you want to be appreciated for criteria more complex and varied than your visible physical structure, find people who are patient and at least mildly analytical (these will be the ones most likely to acknowledge the traits that you value.)
The worst thing that you can do is display impatience and overgeneral thinking. That's exactly the behavior that you despise.
PS: I think that Maslow was an ass.
____________________
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
I went to MIT; I got two degrees there. If you look closely at Philip's work (and those who have worked at ArsDigita are the best positioned to do so), I think that capable software engineers would recognize that Philip's writings, while excellent and interesting, are just hand-waving.
I work at aD, and I've been here since the beginning a few years ago. The amount of misinformation on this staggers me, and the amount of blind Philip worship makes me ill. The posts by Philip represent one side of the story (his), but are far from being the complete story. The claim by RM that "the best developers" have left aD is flagrantly false. In fact, the best developers have stayed because Philip (and his complete disdain for software engineering, design, QA, scalability testing, etc.) no longer exert an influence here. Philip is smart, articulate, and knowledgable about many things, bu the is not a software engineering god, nor is he an expert software architect, nor is he a capable manager.
I love these two paragraphs on an article when they hired Allen Shaheen, "ArsDigita is positioned to become the world leader in open-source community-based solutions," Shaheen said. "This potential is underscored by its growth in the last year by going from $1 million to $20 million in revenue while remaining profitable. I look forward to working with Philip and the ArsDigita organization to scale the business rapidly." Greenspun said, "Allen brings tremendous experience at managing and accelerating the growth of a company like ours. His early work in open systems, his redefining and restructuring the professional services industry over the past 15 years, and his recent Internet startup experience all make him the perfect person to hand over the CEO responsibilities and allow me to spend more time on engineering and education." Here is the article
Temporary mirror up here.
Do domain names matter?
Where do you guys find all this time?
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You, sir, are grammatically wrong. When you refer to a word or a phrase in a sentence, it should either be in quotes or italisized (sic).
Your last paragraph should read:
The excuse me is the preface as to why the question was asked. The way you have it, Excuse Me is a statement. The question following it could be applied to anything.
This anti-VC rhetoric on Slashdot is REALLY childish. In most cases, the VCs don't come in and take the shots, they usually provide a board member and try to guide the company, but if they wanted to run one, they'd start there own.
The problem here, there is a HUGE market downturn. The VCs try to get money out of each investment. If one looks like it is doing well (gonna IPO, etc.) they leave it alone. If one is not doing that well but they believe that they can extract money from it, they will try to get some money out.
In this case, the company has a lot of silly side projects. Greenspun was teaching at MIT, including a class that taught the ACS system. Additionally, his Arsdigita University was teaching ACS. With the products being Open Source, training hundreds of people how to be ACS consultants probably didn't make the VCs happy.
The company was run like it had the value of Microsoft with it's side projects. The VCs realized that aD didn't have the goal of maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. They had a goal of becoming famous.
I believe the VCs saw that wall street wasn't going to reward them, because they were running PROGRAMS designed to DESTROY their OWN competitive advantage. Think about it, as a consulting company around a program you have released Open Source, you get hired because you know it best. With everyone learning it, that's not the case.
I've had potential clients approach me asking to hire me for ACS projects. I know others from MIT that get the same.
The VCs have a right to be pissed.
However, the VC takeover is unlikely to work. Completely reinventing a start-up isn't that bad, but aD might be a BIT too big for that.
Alex
Photo.Net was Philip Greenspun's baby, and as far as I can tell, funded by him. What will happen to it now?
Will it:
Thad
Thad
Hmmm.... We went through something like this last week with Hotlline here on /. It sounds to me like there are a lot of people here accepting one side of a complicated story with no question or critical analysis.
Greylock and General Atlantic are two of the best and most respected VCs in the business. I've pitched to both. A description of them as amoral cash robots is rubbish. These people want to get a good return on an investment, but they are not stupid. Destroying a company to plunder it is just not the way these guys do business.
Keep in mind that a VC who always screws the companies they invest in will not get a crack at the really good ideas. There is competition in VC land as well.
As for suing a founder, very, very unusual for VCs of this caliber. Bad for business. They do not make decisions like this to be vengeful, to even the score, or because they are generally pissed off. My guess is that Mr. Greenspun must have done something way over the top to provoke this. The proposition that a visionary, good hearted founder has been run over by greedy, stupid VCs is not credible.
Why do slashdotters allways assume that a company is better off under the control of founders than under the control of professional managers? Remember what happened to Wang?
So the VCs are suing the cofounders. Clear enough.
Since the VCs took over ArsDigita, many of their best developers and staff have left the company or been fired, and now they are sueing their own co-founders, who gave the company its vision
So the developers and staff are suing the co-founders? Rather, I think someone needs to learn how to use English before they hurt someone.
Rich
arsDigita, not arstechnica. aD was actually quite profitable from my understanding (well, certaintly not an IBM or GM or MSFT in terms of absolute dollars but fairly impressive for a small design shop nonetheless).
I think the numbers mentioned by PG were 10K in initial investment, building into a company with annual revenues in the $millions. I don't know what their profit margin was but it was probably pretty good (the customer is buying all the bandwidth and machinery, all you have to pay are salaries, and maybe the occasional Ferrari ;-).
I wish I knew more about the case. It's still a shame to see this happen to PG and Co. though, I think a lot of people have learned very cool things becuase of their efforts to disseminate what they've learned.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Ars Digita has left their own roots and are reinventing itself. No more open source and selling conculting hours, now they are going to sell software.
Consulting is a very profitable business, now they ae leaving it's roots and a transoforming the comapny to become 'the next Microsoft'. Not strange that the employees are leaving. A business whos most valueable assest are the people behinf it, can't expect to be able to change direction and management and still expect to retain all skilled workers.
It happens when people with no clue try and make profit with something they do not anything about. That lawyers get's involved is no strange either since that is the way many people do business.
I feel sad for Ars Digita who made such a blunder selecting which VC to do business with.
Just saying it like it are.
I had an email/phone exchange with Phil G last year after flaming aD here on /. He basically admitted that every premise he founded the company was wrong (he might have used "incorrect" or "under reevaluation"), and that he had brought in outside management and capital purely because he wasn't personally qualified to run such a large organizaton.
Phillip seems like an outstanding guy, he has accomplished a lot of laudable stuff, and I think his motivations are relatively pure, but I'd hardly say that this is a case of evil vc's vs. the good engineers. He's been made very wealthy by this whole deal, and legal tug of wars with VCs are to be expected if you're trying to make power plays. Maybe there's more going on than that, who knows.
My personal experiences with arsDigita, which have been repeatedly confirmed by friends, indicate that they can really have their heads up their collective ass sometimes. Probably less so than most "internet solutions" companies, but I still don't think I'd hire them or want to work there.
circa75.com
It also looks like they (co-founders) tried to get the company back unsuccessfully.
Shaheen has only posted to the ArsDigita developer community twice in over a year at aD. If you compare this to the contributions Philip, Eve and Tracy have given, this is a joke. Of course that is only a tiny measure, but still. Many of the recent aD posts to the news are with false notices that Greenspun left the company. Not true.
here
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
All the ad hominem attacks aside, Greenspun is a writer and thinker of significant clarity. Agree with him or disagree with him, but you always know where he stands and what he believes in. Even though I don't know anyone at ArsDigita and had no idea he'd left, I knew when I read this stupid piece of corporate bullshit that the real Philip Greenspun could never have had anything to do with it. Think I'll use it next time I teach George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." So, I'm relieved. Relieved to know that someone like Philip Greenspun hadn't turned into just another corporate hack who can't even say what his company is about without confusing more than he clarified.
The Boston Globe chimes in.
But this is probably the same kind of thinking that led VCs, in San Francisco to treat the remaining employees at one company so badly that they basically walked out, screwing the VCs.
Without more info it is hard to know where to point the finger, but I know where I'm placing my bets.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Funny, I don't recall ever reading about ArsTechnica... I remember ArsDigita ;)
I guess there are just too many Ars* out there
Here are court documents
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
I've made a lot of great friends at ArsDigita, and I want to see them succeed, despite the ongoing shenanigans.
I don't think that the majority of people who are posting really understand what's going on at the company, and to comment without fully understanding the situation is, IMO, irresponsible.
Remember, there are still about 200 people at aD. They are real people. People who are no doubt _very_ concerned with the events of recent days.
Why not wait until all the facts are known before jumping the gun? Piling on at this point serves no useful purpose.
.. wolf out.
I would be willing to specify the reliability of my software and stand behind that spec financially. Would you be willing to pay for the serious design, engineering and testing practices that would make your word processor reliable? (Hint: Software is damn hard, so it's gonna cost you...)
I can relate to your sentiment, though.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I hear about this in the news every day -- something about Interest rates, VC's, stocks, money, and Greenspan...
sorry, couldn't resist... alas, I had noooo idea who these people were prior to today.
Hey, can somebody post just what is actually going on? The founders are being sued. Why? IIRC, you still need to base a civil lawsuit on a point of law, even in the land of the free.
Bull & Lifshitz, LLP Announces Class Periods for Class Action Complaints - ARBA, KEI, RHAT, VNTR
Getting targeted by these scumbag shareholder class action attorneys is bad enough. But Red Hat is being chased by a firm called Bull and Lifshitz? Talk about adding insult to injury.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Actually, with mod_aolserver, you can use the ACS with Apache. However, it's developed native to AOLserver, so you get more support/fewer bugs if you use AOLserver.
Actually, there are about a dozen or so companies outside of aD that have based a large portion of their business around ACS consulting. Granted, they're small (I believe none of them employ more than 20 people), but they could support aD's clients if need be. You don't even have to use Oracle if you don't want to--the ACS has been ported to PostgreSQL. Tcl is a minority language to be sure, but it's not that small. As for the ACS's use of AOLserver, if you've already got a substantial investment in Apache, you can still use the ACS if you install mod_aolserver. In any case, it shouldn't be that difficult to translate the principles learned at the aD boot camps to another language, if need be. As for speed/stability, I don't believe any benchmarks have been done on the ACS's performance. I would point out however, that the principal factors limiting the speed for a database-intensive website are a) size of the site's data pipeline b) speed of database read/writes. Oracle is used to back 9 out of 10 of the most popular websites. PostgreSQL (to which the ACS has been ported) is used to back SourceForge (which switched from MySQL due to speed/transaction issues). AOL uses AOLserver to serve most of the pages for their corporate web sites. All of the components of the ACS have been field tested under high load conditions.
Cool companies don't make money, monolithic conglomerates make money.
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
I could not find a mention of why they are suing anywhere.
It is sad though.
Good Idea...free.
Venture Capital...10,000
Hire a few people...100,000+
Company makes money...$$$
The People you hired fire you...priceless.
Life's full of greedy people, for everything else theres Mastercard, esp for rent since you're no unemployed
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Excuse me. Did I miss something?
I dont think you are grammatically wrong, but it should read.
Excuse me, did I miss something?
The excuse me being the preface as to why the question is being asked. The way you have it Excuse Me is a statement. And the question following it can apply to anything.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Eve and Tracy Adams? Didn't they star together in a full length XXX featurette back in the 80's?
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
The company was a disaster while I was there. It grew way too fast. Philip's girlfriend had about half the company reporting to her. While Philip had that palatial beach house on Cape Cod, those of us who were in Cambridge from out of town were sleeping either on futons on the floor of their old office, or in MIT frat houses. When we weren't at the office, that is. 60 hour weeks were a minimum, and the office was mostly full at 8 and 9pm most nights.
What finally drove me out were some particularly nasty security holes that were discovered in the ACS over the summer, and the amateur and unprofessional manner in which they were dealt with internally. It made me realize how much Philip's arrogant "We're smarter than everyone else" attitude had permeated the corporate culture. That arrogance led the writers of the ACS to repeat the same mistakes that other web developers had made -- and fixed -- years ago. I'm talking simple things that Perl CGI programmers have been using for years like taint checking and using bind variables in SQL calls. If you're going to reinvent the wheel, you need to do some research into what's wrong -- and right -- about current wheels.
Now I'm working for a small consulting firm with clients who are actually making money. I may not be making the big dotcom bucks anymore, but I'm working sane hours and earning a lot more per hour than I ever did working in Philip's sweatshop.
Unfortunately, Greenspun signed a shareholder's agreement when the VCs came in that probably prevents him from doing this, so it looks like the money people win again (as usual.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so I could be reading the document wrong...
The point is, many of us were inspired by what he wrote/said/taught. He was good back then, he's good right now. All of this is being caused by the techno-bubble bursting. All of a sudden, since companies aren't making the billions they used to make a year ago, people (whether founders or venture capitalists) get nervous and make poor choices. Give it a few years, until another boom happens, and Philip and the gang will be up with another "cool company" concept.
Veni, vidi, vici.
Reading through some of the comments below, I'm utterly disgusted with some of the irresponsible speculation and disparaging of a company and people who you obviously know nothing about. I've known Eve, Jin and Philip personally, and they are GOOD and kind people, who have worked extremely hard and made many sacrifices to get the company up to the level that it is today. I wish only the absolute best for them. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Your vitriol against Philip, and your characterisation of Jin as his 'lackey', adds up to a pretty extreme critique of the team that created the concept, original product, and the brand that pays your cheque every month. I can only assume that they have done something or things pretty unspeakable. But apart from saying that he's a bad manager, you and the other aD posters haven't said exactly what it is that's got you so pissed. There are clearly two sides to this story but all that's coming from your side is anger and spite - no explanation. On the other side, it looks like a case of the founders and majority shareholders being ousted by VCs because of a disagreement over open source. If that's wrong then please post and tell us why. But please don't just sound off that we're pathetic. Some of us have been around the ACS a long time and know a lot about the history of aD and the ACS community. And I personally know and know of several aD employees, including senior ones, who are very unhappy with the way aD has gone over the last few months and the dispute with PG.
ArsDigita is around the corner from my old house. I applied for a job there 8 months ago, told they were looking for experienced UNIX/Oracle developers/admins with a focus on security. I got a tour from a developer who gave me details about their hoped-for IPO (violating 2 SEC regulations), major contracts under negotiation, and details of their network (in)security. Hm. I was scheduled for a phone interview 2 days later, which the interviewer forgot, then called me 30 minutes late from his car and asked 3 vague, stupid questions (like "so you can program in C++, huh?"), while talking to the person next to him about the location of their next meeting. He also did not have a job description of the position for which I was interviewing.
Three months after I forgot about it I got a FedEx box with an AD cap and shirt, and a letter written in nearly incomprehensible english explaining that they did not need UNIX nor security staff (yeah, that's what they thought). The letter went on to apologize for the company's lack of professionalism, then made excuses for same ("we're really young, and growing fast"). I would never get to use the Playstations in the nap room, nor look at the fish tanks, nor get my own $1000 Herman Miller office chair. But, I could wear the gear and advertise for them. Sheesh.
The current regime at AD seems to be falling back on the 'safest' business model it can find. Too bad about that, but I have 10 years business experience as well as 6 years technical, and if I were to invest in that company, I would have required management to grow up in order to keep the venture sustainable. I really do not think the company that I saw 8 months ago could have lasted.
I feel like I should step in and give some picture of what it's like on the inside, coming from the position of a developer that has been excited about ArsDigita for years, but decided to join only recently.
I started working for aD about a month ago as a developer. I decided to come to work for aD, despite the fact that Philip (with whom I shared an office 3 years ago at MIT, and who sparked my original interest in aD at that time) is no longer a participating member of the company. I admire Philip for his accomplishments in building aD, and for the excitement that he has incited in myself and others for interesting uses of the web. I also think that it is kind of insane that the founder of a company can be kicked out of his own company. I can't comment on why Philip isn't here anymore (because I have no personal experience with the matter - no one has tried to restrict my speech about the company in any way), but nothing that I've heard from others that work here suggests that it is any particular tragedy that he's gone. What I can say, however, is that ArsDigita is still an awesome place to work. Everyone whom I have come into contact with here is astoundingly competent, and most believe very strongly in the ideals that I think this company is all about. For the first time in my life, I feel that I am completely surrounded by people who are as good (better) at what I do as I am.
I came to ArsDigita because I believe very strongly in free software, and great software in general. I am of the RMS breed of free software zealots that believe that the GPL is the only way to fly. Naturally, I have been skeptical during my first few weeks here, feeling out what aD's commitment to free software is really like, now that there have been some big changes in the company. What I have seen thus far is that everyone that I have come into contact with is committed to the freeness of ACS. Even the big bad executives seem to understand and believe that keeping ACS free is not just a token gesture toward the community or marketing bonus, but a core part of the way we do business. They also understand that aD as a company, as wonderful and amazing as it is, is still a company that must have revenue to succeed. Building that revenue, in a tougher economy, while remaining committed to the ideals that Philip has written about is the challenge that we now face. This challenge is the reason that ArsDigita exists, and I feel comfortable saying that it will continue to be the reason for our existence in the future (until we figure it all out, of course, then we'll move on to the next challenge).
ArsDigita may not be a crazy little startup anymore, running out of an apartment, with everyone working 80 hour weeks. Philip may not be around anymore, publishing lots of information to get noticed on the web. The company, however, is still here, still strong, and all about building and giving away the best software, publishing great educational materials on the web, and building the best web sites out there. Philip's not here anymore, but there's a whole swarm of people who came here because they believed in a lot of what he was saying, and who will work their asses off to make sure that ArsDigita remains as great as it ever was.
Does this lawsuit effect the ArsDigita Prize ( http://arsdigita.org/prize/ ) that awards creators of webservices with up to 10,000 dollars, or will this go on despite the lawsuit?