ActiveState Founder Steps Aside

Posted by chrisd on Friday August 9, 2002 @11:18AM 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."

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Why? by aero6dof · 2002-08-09 11:32 · 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?