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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.
One useful thing I remember reading about Lord Sugar (that champion of business, who made most of his fortune from buying rental properties, yay) is when he talked about the days after the Amstrad IPO. Most of his management became instant millionaires (which meant something back then), and he commented that some turned up at work the next day and continued with no perceptible change in their behavior, while others rocked on up late in a brand new car and proceed to turn into giant egos. The most interesting thing is that he didn't seem to think there was any predictor as to how someone would turn out.
In my own short business career I would tend to agree with this. It is extremely hard to know how someone will behave when they come into money, because most people do not have much money or any hope of getting it. You can have people who appear frugal and responsible, and they will always tell you how responsible they will be if they ever got money, but in my experience none of this prevents them undergoing a quite remarkable gollum like transformation when a large enough quantity of cash is placed in front of them.
It would appear this guy falls into the 'drunk on money' category. Personally I'm surprised the VC's or whoever put the money up let him get away with this sort of behavior. Someone like that is not going to ever make you money, because for them money is the end, not the means by which you can build a profitable organisation.
All media has a political agenda. The old media is collapsing for lack of anything except a political agenda. The real question is "who will pay for investigative reporters" in the new media world. Ideally, we'll have them from all sides. Project Veritas, a very small group with a right-wing agenda, is a stark contrast to the lack of similar investigative work on the left (at least in the US) for the past several years. I like Project Veritas: real, old-school undercover work, but they're never going to e.g. find scandalous corruption in the NRA or Trump's businesses.
Any idiot can read the news and tell me what I'm "supposed to think" about it. Fuck those guys. Show me the hidden camera footage - that's a real journalist.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.