Slashdot Mirror
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.
1st class flights, Ibiza hotels,and Michelin-star restaurants.
The rest was squandered I suspect
They don't like my add blocker and I am not turning it off for them.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The COO was right: you don't need TENTS to sleep indoors. Instead he should have just bought some sleeping bags and a couple of pillows.
oh, don't be so cynical. i'm sure a good chunk of it went to hookers and coke.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The two women confirmed that he was up all night.
#DeleteFacebook
This guy has what it takes to be a future banking exec, pharma exec, or a US senator. He'd better immigrate now, before the US builds a wall on its border with the UK.
And they would, having agreed to at least an oral contract.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A narcissistic douche in love with himself, a fondness for hookers, burns through money and leaves a trail of debt and bad business in his wake. He should run for office.
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.
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.
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?
I remember hearing stories like this before the dotcom crash.
The absolute best was one about a startup whose website could be used to change your screen resolution. It was a spoof, but totally brilliant.
Indeed:
Clearly "mysterious women" is a spelling of "prostitute" that I haven't seen before.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The first one is with women, and it is the most enjoyable.
The second one is with gambling, and it is the fastest.
The third one is with engineers, and it is the safest.
It seems that mr. Nardone, to be 100% sure of the outcome, used all of them.
My first thought after reading the summary was Bender yelling, "Like Facebook, but with blackjack and hookers!"
You do know Mark Zuckerberg once famously expensed a large travel-related expense as "hookers and blow", right? (The story goes he was pissed at being accused of wasting investors' money on nonsense, and he returned fire in a passive-aggressive way.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All the research says you are completely wrong.
Even professional stock pickers, the ones who manage funds for a living, fail to outperform a broad stock index like the S&P 500 over time. Hot one year, a skunk the next. Seriously, look it up. The problem is that the information you are using to make your picks is known to everyone else too. This drives the stock price. Unless you have insider information (which is a crime to use to make trades), there is no way you "know" better than anyone else which way a stock will go.
Do yourself a favor and set aside a chunk of money in an S&P 500 (or moral equivalent) index fund and use the rest for active trading. Compare your total returns for both after 1, 3, 5 years. See for yourself. Hell, you don't even have to do that: if you can be honest with yourself, compare your total returns against publicly published S&P 500 total return data.
I challenge you to demonstrate to yourself that you have outperformed the S&P 500 index fund. Include ALL trading costs when you do so, and include re-investment of dividends into the 500 fund when you do this, don't just look at stock price.