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."

Comments

Re:So now even opensource falls...

[unicron]

It's all about the benjamins? These times they are a changin'?(post below). Can you possibly speak without using trite cliche's? If you have to resort to using someone else's momentary maxim's, you really don't deserve a seat at the debate table.

And what in the FUCK does Enron have to do with a company deciding it wants to start getting paid for its work? I would love to know how you can find a similarity between an embezzling, criminalistic company and a small software company with ideas of coming up in the world and creating bigger and better software, which requires money, son.

My god you are ignorant. What the hell is "OS style" software? Open Source is yes/no type of thing, it either is or it isn't, and last time I looked Activestate wasn't. "OS Style"..is that like being "kinda pregnant"?

So the people involved in the company want to stop driving geo's and living in studio apartments. Oh no, when will the evilness end? They must in league with Lucifer and the Bill Gates and the DMCA monster, run for the hills!

You are the genetic summation of every /. user that thinks the constitution protects his ability to warez photoshop or that compares Gates to Hitler or thinks software piracy makes him a freedom-fighter. With friends like you, the concepts of OS, Free-software and technology rights needs no enemies.

They'll be bankrupt in five years

[McSpew]

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.

To go public

[taniwha]

The basic problem is that to eventually be a public company you need to be of a certain size - N shares times $15/share. Why go public - because you need to be able to pay off the VCs and the founders (all those engineers who worked their butts off for 3 years with the hope of making it big).

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.

Re:To go public

[taniwha]

while I mostly agree with much of what you say - I have to disagree - if you've done the startup thing enough times you know what to negotiate for - and have the contacts to get into a startup early enough to get a big chunk (you know one of those single digit employee number sorts of things - as an engineer I've got way more than 1% a couple of times) - you also know that if you're moderately successfull dilution will occur, the VCs will get there's and chances are it WILL fail. You probably also know when to bail and when to actually pay for stock up front (the tax consequences, AMT and all that stuff)

One of the sad things about the whole dot-com thing was how incredibly naive people were - when there were people all around them who'd been down this road before

I've worked a number of startups over the past 20 years - most were moderately successfull, one went public - but like the stock market I've always considered it a risky long-term investment that will one day hopefully pay off.

What is the real purpose of a company?

[cpeterso]

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..

Re:What is the real purpose of a company?

[InternalWave]

Thank you. Yours, and others' comments, at least reassure me that I am not the only guy who wondered why the hell a company needs to *grow* all the time in order to be successful. I tend to agree; maybe more companies should be private.

After all, consider the hypothetical example of a company that employs 20 people, and sells enough each year to break even, or slightly better, after operating and manufacturing expenses, salaries, loan repayments etc etc. Only in a twisted economic system would you consider this situation to be a bad thing. Oh, they can't be successful - they didn't grow! Who gives a shit - they kept their market happy, paid all their creditors and employees, and paid out some Christmas bonus money - what more do you need?

I guess that's why I am not on Wall Street - my views would be unpopular amongst all the parasites and leeches. After all, that institution could never survive if speculation bit the dust.

On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow? I don't mean right now, where we are financially in trouble, but I mean in the abstract. To listen to economists and pundits you'd get the impression that every national economy has to grow, grow, grow all the time, or you're screwed. Why? Let's assume that the population is not blowing up anymore, and that we are happy with our per capita wealth - somebody explain to me why the economy needs to grow?

Oh wait, I guess I answered my own question - if the economy doesn't grow then the per capita wealth of the top 1% won't increase...

Re:Trouble with AS Perl

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

If you were doing this now, I'd say go with Cygwin. It's a normal build of Perl, from perl sources, and you get the whole Cygnus UNIXalike toolkit. it's very good, I even use WindowMaker from Cygwin as my window manager (it looks really cool). ALl of the CPAN stuff just plugs in easily. Same with ActiveState TCL. I use Cygwin tcl/Tk. It works fine.

One thing you might have bumped into was the whole braindead "I only know stuff by filename extensions" that the servers used to do in the early days, before IIS even existested.

Sometimes you just have to quit to be real.

[HLFat]

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?

Re:Why I stepped aside ...

[vegetablespork]

OMG. "Corporate communication policy server side solution"? If you really are Mr. Hardt, please say you don't mean the sort of system I read about in Communications of the ACM a couple of years ago taht tries to enforce "chain of command" for emails (e.g. a clerk can't email the CEO without going through his front line supervisor, who passes it to the department head, who passes it to the Deputy Assistant Vice President for Keeping the CEO uninformed, ad nauseam). Please. PLEASE.