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ActiveState Founder Steps Aside

Posted by chrisd on from the if-you-don't-know-perl-you-don't-know... dept.

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."

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. The best thing you can do for your company... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Why? by aero6dof · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Why? by aero6dof · · Score: 3, Insightful
      1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million.

      Or the VCs need to learn improve their success rates. Maybe pushing along the company too fast causes 7 out of those 10 to fail, when they would have been perfectly fine taking more time. The investors providing VC funds with money have been pulling their funds back out. In the current climate, investors are going to be many times more critical about IPO buys - especially if the company seems like its propped up with low-integrity strategies. It would seem smarter to slow down your burn rate, wait for a better environment on Wall Street, and present solid financials for your IPO.
  3. OT: Cygwin tips. by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some random tips...

    1) Make sure you set up your /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:
    mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd
    mkpasswd -d -u USERNAME >> /etc/passwd

    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 .bashrc, make sure you have a .bash_profile that sources .bashrc. I found out it's not done automatically.

    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.

  4. Compare with Metrowerks acquisition by Animats · · Score: 3, Insightful

    $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.