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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."
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.
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?
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.
/. 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.
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
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?)
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 :)