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Story Of a Founder Who Burned Through $21M While His Social App Fling Crashed (businessinsider.com)
London-based social media app Fling, which never brought in any revenue, burned through $21 million in less than three years. According to a Business Insider report, the founder splashed out on 1st class flights, Ibiza hotels, and Michelin-star restaurants (Editor's note: The link could ask users to disable their adblockers; alternate source. From the report: In early July 2015, temperatures were rising in the boardroom on the top floor of a 12-story office block in Hammersmith, West London. Marco Nardone, the 28-year-old CEO and founder of social media app Fling, had called an emergency meeting the day after his app was removed from the App Store by Apple for being too similar to the notorious Chatroulette platform. The atmosphere was tense and Nardone was furious, three former employees said, because his COO, Emerson Osmond, had gone behind his back. Specifically, he was angry because Osmond had told Nardone's assistant not to order tents for the office that would allow staff to sleep by their desks and work around the clock to get Fling back onto the App Store, a former employee told Business Insider. Nardone shouted and swore at Osmond before squaring up to him as if he was about to do something more, said two former employees. [...] On the day, Nardone asked staff to work late so they could address the issue. The CEO turned up in the middle of the night with two women that staff had never seen before and took them into a room, according to three former employees.
Easier to simply disable Javascript.
#DeleteFacebook
Would Microsoft have ever permitted WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 in the "DOS Program Store"? Anyone developing programs for these treacherous (allegedly "smart") devices gets what they deserve. It seems the entire world is suffering some kind of brain cancer or Stockholm Syndrome with these insidious devices.
"Apps" are the exact opposite of what Personal Computers are supposed to be. Stop giving them your time and money.
Alternatively, let the engineers rest properly, and then they'll come back and write both more code, and better code the next day.
Programming jobs have been plentiful for the past 20 years or so, and they will continue to be into the foreseeable future, until AI becomes so good that it has not only taken over every job but it has taken over programming itself.
You don't have to tolerate working conditions like this. Exercise your right to quit, and go work somewhere else.
If you are a programmer, you are making enough money to save some of it. Use that savings as your insurance policy in case you have to quit. If you're living in most countries in the West and you're at least a halfway decent programmer, you should be able to find a new job within a few weeks.
Don't be greedy. You won't become a millionaire working as a programmer, but you will make plenty of money throughout your life. If you're hanging on to a bad job because of some promise of future wealth, then you're cheating yourself and you wasted your money on that engineering degree.
The point of being a programmer isn't to become rich. You would have majored in business if you cared about that. The point of being a programmer is to solve interesting problems in novel ways. If you lose sight of that then your career is going to have real problems.
If you get lucky and somehow wind up with shares that you can cash out for big bucks, then that should be a bonus, but let me give you a word of advice. You will be much happier if you are compensated mostly in cash. Your equity compensation is at the mercy of people who aren't smart enough to solve techncial problems, so they got business degrees. Do you understand now why putting up with a shitty job at a start up is a fool's game?
Oh it's not getting caught you have to evade; it's paying consequences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If only there were someone with business leadership skills like that. We could get him elected President and make American bankrupt, erm.... great again.
Uh, we just had 8 years of that in case you missed it. $10T in new debt - lovely, eh? Hopefully the Orange One will do something better, but I'm not holding my breath.
Do you have ESP?
I'm sure this is actually a strategy for some people. Not spending all the cash on themselves, that's just a nice bonus, but spending lots of money on extravagances so that it looks like their business is well funded and on the up. If you turn up at the company and everyone has a Herman Miller chair and expensive car, it projects a very different image to a few people in a spartan office with a stack of empty pizza boxes in the corner. Even on the personal level, meeting a CEO who looks rich makes it seem like the company is already successful.
Of course, when I see a salesman turn up in a Jag I know instantly that I'm probably not going to buy anything from him. I'm not going to fund his new Aston Martin.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You're observing the wrong person. Observe his wife if you want to know how much cash he'll burn through given the opportunity.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Or do you think you are somehow entitled to see their content?
Once upon a time the internet was a place to put information you wanted to share with other people. Not "I just want money. I don't give a shit about you. I gets my money maybe I'll give you little a trinket of content you stupid git."
No. He lacks a crucial qualification....He does not have the ability to avoid getting caught....
FTA, he got caught and is now running another company that is buying and selling the IP rights from his former company and he's on a world vacation. It just goes to show the weaknesses in our system. We put a cashier in jail who stole change from the cash register at Walmart, but commit white collar fraud and breaking all kinds of corporate laws, no big deal. What vexes my mind is he still can apparently find investors to keep giving him money.