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ActiveState Founder Steps Aside
Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."
And the dominoes come tumbling down... Its a sad day when companies founded on FSF and OS sytle software and development fall apart over greed... Al la Enron anyone? Its all about the Benjamins
"Hollowpoints: When you care enough to send the very best."
How pretentious is that. Jeez. Only the MS Word grammar checker cares about the that/which distinction.
I've always had problems getting ActiveState Perl to work in Windows. Maybe it was the fault of the OmniHTTPd server, I dunno. Ah well.
is to know when to step aside. Executives don't take note of this fact nearly often enough, especially in high tech. If more had taken such notice and taken action at the appropriate time I doubt we'd be in quite the economic situation we're in now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now? It's this need for disruptively fast riches that's driving the WorldCom silliness. It's really OK to be a small to medium company with steady growth.
My prediction is that they'll take on huge debts & expenses to try to expand, fail in 90% of their new "expansion" markets, and die completely or settle back to their same growth curve and niche only saddled with several times more debt. Are there any studies on companies trying for excessive growth?
w00t.
congrats to all involved, and kudos to the CEO for realizing he was in over his head. nothing worse than a CEO that doesn't know how to be a CEO.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
bwahahaha.
sorry. it's immature and all, but c'mon, dick hardt... it's funny.
Yes, on most forms he would be named Hardt, Dick.
It's worth to say that Larry Wall (perl founder) and Guido van Rossun (python founder) are now in their payroll. So this is an important contribution to the open source community
Ten, tops.
Any time a company decides it needs to get ten times bigger, it's taking a huge risk. It's certainly possible they'll grow to ten times their current size, but it's not particularly likely in today's economic climate. Investors got drunk on 15-20% returns during the heyday of the Internet bubble, but what we've seen in the last 18 months is that those returns were illusory. Growth (and returns) in the 5-10% range are far more sustainable.
If they want to grow to ten times their current size, they'd better plan on taking at least 10 years to do it.
Is this an attempt to "Slashdot" this company's stock?
Ars Digita
four-oh-four
This model for building a tech company has been basicly the only way to create a company here in the US since the 60s - the VCs understand how it works, the execs, the engineers all know how it works. Most of these companys die - maybe 2 out of 10 live to go public - it's the risk you take building a startup - it's also effects the scale of things the VCs try for - they need those 10-20% of BIG successes to pay for all the investments that fail. The basic business model for people starting this sort of company is "we will build a company that's worth something and sell it on the stock market". You make money from an ever increasing stock price.
Of course it's not the only way to build a company you can start a small company and grow it slowly financing it out of profit - this is really hard to do (I know I've tried :-) - but not impossible - I've known a number of people who've built such companies - you have a completely different model for your business "we will sell the stuff we make and take home part of the profits". You make money from your profits.
The big advantage of the DIY company is that you can stop growing at any point. Besides, because you're living directly off your profits you don't have to grow for ever to keep making money - you can stop at $1M or $5M or wherever you're comfortable. The big downside is you're probably spending your own (very real) money, not some VCs.
Where can I download that?
Software Wars
I agree that not every company can or should strive to be a $100M company. I sometimes wonder how many accounting scandals and dot-com companies we would have if there was no such thing as the stock market. What if every company was a privately-owned company? No stock selling scandals, no "cooking the books" for hitting quarterly earnings estimates, and no underwater stock options.
I guess this is almost a philosophical question. What is the PURPOSE of a company? To make money, provide jobs, improve the world, or increase its stock price?
I mean, what is the REAL value of owning a company's stock? If the company does not pay dividends (such as MSFT), then what am I really buying and selling? Regardless of the dot-com bubble, the stock market still seems mostly like a pyramid scheme..
cpeterso
Fact is, if you speak to someone who works or has worked at ActiveState, you'll hear that Dick H. has a humungous ego and is lacking in the interpersonal skills dept. Briefly, Dick is a dick. Personality or personal reasons could have as much to do with Dick leaving as anything else. I would be unsurprised to learn that the growth spin is just that... spin.
If you must use Windows for Perl, use the perl 5.6 (or perl 5.8) that comes with Cygwin. It works just like UNIX - with forward slashes for paths.
This is Slashdot's very first INTERACTIVE TROLL. How do you interact with this troll? Why, it's very simple! All you have to do is copy this text, reply to this post, and then repaste this text into the new post! Fun for hours and hours and hours! Enjoy!
REPLY TO THIS POST!!!
Corporate idiots have taken over. Middle management will now move in and slow the company to a crawl.
The average business day will now be meetings, layoffs, donuts, histrionics by incompetent managers, huge debt loads and massive spending on overpriced, irrelevant crap.
All of the competent employees (the people who actually build things that other people want to buy) will be laid off, forced out, or outright fired, only to be replaced by compliant, agreeable, loyal know-it-alls, who will put their voice mail on "never reply", drench themselves in office politics, be paid higher salaries and will never be laid off.
The HR department will triple in size and hiring will be reduced by 90%.
Customers will be forgotten.
Happens every time.
I think the key quote from the News.com article:
"The initial expansion will be funded with current company resources, but next year ActiveState might seek a round of financing in the first or second quarter, Pike said."
The investors that put big bucks into a company like that demand a healthy return on their investment. Otherwise, why take the risk?
If a company founder is happy with a small company, the answer is simple: don't borrow money.
I can't wait for the day XFree86/Cygwin will be able to do rootless windows...
I was the CTO and "Holder of the plan" of a company that managed to develop a technology valuable enough to have been bought by a larger company. Or, if you prefer, to be bought by a company in the craze to buy companies. Any way you look at it we were bought. And, frankly, I am glad of it. But here is the thing. Once bought the new 'management' went about changing just about everything. How we did things. What we wrote. Whoe was on-time and who was late. Who was "leader" and who were the dregs. Typical big-business bullsh*t. Hey. I am not complaining. They paid me well. But I quit. In three months. Why? Does BONEHEAD ring any bells?
Thought I would post to clarify why I stepped aside. ActiveState is doing very well right now and we are about to grow out our management team and capitalize on our new product line PerlMx, an anti-spam, anti-virus and corporate communication policy server side solution. I have never run a large management team and in discussions with my board, we decided ActiveState was more likely to be successful having me be part of the management team rather than leading it, allowing me to focus on growing product capabilities. ... and if anyone thinks they have an original joke on my name, I'd like to hear it
Dick walks out of a bar in great pain and says "Apparently he wasn't asking what my name was, he was asking if I wanted anything."
BTW Good luck with the stepping aside thing. I hope you know the people who you are handing the reigns over to well and that they are of high integrity and have good leadership skills. I have rarely seen the reigns handed to people who weren't unscrupulous, power hungry, and/or unqualified.
-Eric
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I've been using Active State Perl since almost the beginning. If just read the early versions of the Perl docs there was no question the authors of Perl and Perl modules were hostile to Windows and really didn't give a damn if Perl would ever run well on Windows systems or not. Active State brought out their first Perl and while it followed Perl syntax lots and lots of stuff didn't work because all sorts of assumptions existed in modules and code about the underlying system being a Unix box.
With each new release Perl on Windows became more functional. Today you can write most Perl apps the way you would write them on a Unix box and they'll run fine under Windows. Further modules have been written by Active State which create genuine functionality for the Windows / Perl developer. Active State did a hard project well with what looks like a pretty small team. They've also created some pretty good value added commercial products.
I wish them luck on the path of rapid growth. They've proven themselves on the path of rapid improvement.
Some random tips...
/etc/passwd, I think if you log in locally, it will set it up for you, but if you log in from the net it won't pull in the entire domain (probably for the good). do: /etc/passwd /etc/passwd
.bashrc, make sure you have a .bash_profile that sources .bashrc. I found out it's not done automatically.
1) Make sure you set up your
mkpasswd -l >
mkpasswd -d -u USERNAME >>
2) The Cygwin bash term (like if you go to the start menu and get a bash shell) takes the standard ANSI escape sequences. So you can do the normal PROMPT_COMMAND things and have your cwd in the title in the term window. I love this. Problem is, the termcap doesn't seem to totally jibe with termcaps on the Solaris machines I log in to, so I still have to use XTerms if I want scrolling in say man pages to work right. Set this up in the
3) cygstart (in the cygutils package) is your friend. It's the glue that integrates the Windows and Cygwin sides well. cygstart --open on a Windows App path will open it in a new window. cygstart --open on a doc will open the doc in the app associated with it in Windows. If you pass in paths from cygwin to a windows app, translate the path before. Here, $(cygpath -w unix_style_path) is your other friend.
4) If you want to open a cygwin app without the attendant DOS window, check out the run utility.
5) Look for "Command Prompt here" on Microsoft web sites. Then open up RegEdit, look for DosHere, and change the command to the path to your bash shell. Then you can open up bash shells in any directory. Nice.
$100 million is a stretch for a programming tools company. Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola for US$95 million in 1999. Metrowerks had good technology, a lock on the Mac development tools market, a key position in embedded systems development, and was the sole source for development systems for some major game machines. ActiveState has a bunch of second-tier open source development tools.
I was at the final "let's get rid of Dick Hardt" board meeting fiasco. What a mess. . . here's what happened.
/^(f[uc|rea]k)ing m.*dia.*$/$1 you/" and Rossum starts shouting about how no-one respects his space and how it was time for something completely different, blah, blah, blah. ESR starts mumbling to Guido about how Ovitz is finally going to get whacked, and then it really gets weird. . .
.
Everything starts out ok. . . typical boring board minutes stuff, somebody announces that we have a special guest and then who walks in? Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Kenneth Lay and the DVD Consortium, trying to jack the whole proceedings! Well, Van Rossum and Wall completely freak out. Wall is like "get out of here you
The whole room goes silent, the lights dim, this evil-looking powerpoint starts playing and this menacing voice starts calling for the elimination of Dick Hart. . . When I saw who it was, I couldn't believe it. I always kinda figured Microsoft's investment might sink the company, but I never knew who was behind all of this - most of the other ActiveStaters never would've guessed it either...A cloaked figure emerged from the break-room shadows and revealed himself to be. .
Cowboy Neal.
(did you guess right?)
Having spent some small amount of time with him at the last PDC (in Ellay) and Lord O'Reilly's P2P in San Fran, i respect Mr. Hardt and really, really like AS' products (having Big Pimped them out to a large # of my consulting clients, who have both ordered and used them).
If you have never had any experience with scripting on Windows (you Lucky Dog), and you have had such experience on *NIX, than you will find AS' scripting solutions a GODSEND, and an absolute vital add-on to VSE....
It's fashionable to assume that any time a CEO/Founder steps down that the vulture capitialists have pressured them to do so for some B-School suit that can't tell a computer from a kumquat, but who give good meeting...
Dick (and his Krewe) have done fine job on bringing both effective scripting and a very productive development environment to the Windows environment.
AS (along with others like Don Box) have been instrumental in making MS take the independent developer community seriously. AS has particularly been our community's advocate in bringing adult scripting to the platform. If it weren't for people like Dick and companies like Active State, we might all still be using DOS batch commands and the WSH.
Maybe (GASP!) Dick is telling the truth. And AS has a chance (in this rather difficult growth environment) to make some BigNoyz and accompanying BigBuks for all the people that have worked so hard to make useful scripting a reality on a OS that was NEVER designed to be efficiently scripted.
Maybe for once, we could all skip the requisite
(besides Lori is a serious Marketing Goddess!)
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Candidates include:
Experience people, experience! We want to be either a 100 million dollar company, or at least a company that looks like one.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Ten years ago, I worked for a company in which John Sidgmore was brought on board. The company was soon for sale.
$100 million company isn't scratch - you don't suppose ActiveState may be thinking about making room for a puppet dictator, or perhaps selling the company outright to a certain Redmond-based software interest?
Guess I should have seen that coming when they jacked the prices on their Perl Development Kit (still worth it), divorced it from O'Reilly, and began taking a very MSDN approach to their Perl packaging.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
I found AS perl to be much faster than the one that comes with cygwin.
Any exploration of the filesystem seemed an order of magnitude faster.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
2. Call me Dick.
3. Corporate Communication Policy enforcement are often tasks such as scanning outbound email for profanity or intellectual property leaks. The scenario you talk about is what Exchange and Notes do :)
You forgot one :-)
Someone thinks they smell money here. But I have serious doubts
that they will become a $1x10^8 company. I've
never paid them any money. Have you?
What is their business model? This is either politics,
(i.e. someone wants Hardt out of there way) or it's greed rearing
its ugly head or both.
We will see activestate wither on the vine and
fall off unless someone that realizes what activestate's
about comes on board.
They make a perl for windows (and some other stuff).
And few people pay for perl for windows.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
if you modded this as a troll its because you dont know the story of ars digita.