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At Burning Man While Your Startup Burns (techcrunch.com)
There's a difference between clearing your head, and ditching your dying startup to do drugs in the desert. From a report: Whether you're going to Burning Man, Ibiza, SXSW, or some big international tech conference, the message you send is the same. If your startup isn't succeeding, you're skipping out on the dirty work while hoping some miracle revelation or networking connection will save you. And it probably won't. For those less familiar, Burning Man is when 70,000 people build a temporary city of tents and RVs in the Nevada desert where no money is exchanged, and instead everyone seeks to gift strangers with giant art installations, workshops, food, drinks, and celebrations. But I get a sinking feeling when I notice or hear about the leaders of a struggling startup trying to dance or dose away their troubles. Being out of a contact for several days to a week since there's no reliable cellular connection and a stigma against phone use creates a decision-making bottleneck that can slow down your company. Ex-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey here points out how juice presser startup Juicero's founder Doug Evans took off to Burning Man for week. That's despite the company recently admitting it needed to lower prices after Bloomberg reporters revealed you could simply squeeze Juicero juice packs by hand without the $400 machine. In the middle of that week Evans was at Burning Man, Juicero announced it would suspend sales of its juicer and juice packs as it desperately tries to find an acquirer. While Evans handed over the CEO title to former Coca-Cola exec Jeff Dunn late last year, the company told TechCrunch "Evans is Juicero's full time Founder and Chairman of the Board and very active within the company."
Shouldn't people be allowed to take vacations? I have no problem with this.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Everybody need some break from work. And frankly being at work without a solution just shuffling paper around would not help either. You gotta be American thinking you gotta work 110% of your time and have success. Hint : success is 10% sweat, 30% connection, and 60% luck. Beside that Juicero was a stupid product for stupid people, not taking one day off will not help it, it is by now a dead product.
Figure-head/strong employment contract. Sounds like regardless of the future of the company he's fine.
Who wouldn't want to celebrate
Was clever and original enough when is started, for a few years, back in the 90s. Now? An over-priced Disneyland for Marketing Execs going through their second childhood or third divorce...
Does any of this surprise anyone? What in the world did anyone expect better than this from a guy trying to sell $8 glasses of juice on a subscription?
The market was non-existant AND/OR the management/owners were incompetent.
But it was a $400 blender no one wanted, and that is ultimately why the company failed.
Honestly, many of the folks that go to Burning Man are Juicero's target market. They're relatively wealthy (enough to fund a week of living in the desert, often in quite a bit of style). They're focused on nature and on being healthy. A lot of other wealthy people attend. If he's looking for customers or a purchaser, that's an ideal place to go. So think of it more like attending a critical industry conference.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Poor Juicero -- fell into the trap that so many people who think highly of their own talents and desires fall into:
As with so many areas where people work on something that is their passion (whether food, music, art, coffee, wine) is that they start to forget that the effort (or depth of intention) they put into it does not necessarily translate into how much other people value it, or how much people are willing to pay for it.
You get people who think that because they slaved away for hours on a painting, essay, cup of coffee or artisinal x,y,z, etc, or that they did it with such depth of feeling means that they can charge big $$ for it.
If that were true, history / philosophy / library science majors would be pulling in huge bucks for all the time they spent studying esoteric things that no one cares about, while people who scrape the internet for cute cat videos would be sitting in poverty. And arc welders who do a job on site, leave, and never have to think about it again would be barely getting by instead of being paid $70 / hour.
The other thing they start to forget is that few people care about the extra details that they care about, because they've been immersed in the topic for years and lost an absolute sense of proportion, such as:
- the ability to remotely cancel juice bags on expiration
- having a squeezing mechanism that saves you 10 seconds of effort but costs $400...
People who go to Burning Man (in my stereotyped way of thinking) tend to have a mindset that belief and values and ideology will carry the day -- and this resonates in my mind with what happened at Juicero. They tend not to be the people who put their nose to the grindstone and do a dirty job that has no glory or isn't "humanity-changing", but pays well and is reliable.
At this point, it doesn't really matter if the CEO is on vacation -- it's just a symptom of what was happening all along. 3 days absence isn't going to change the company's future...
Christ, if it was a blender at least it would be useful for something else. With the Juicero, after you realize the pouches you've been buying are pointless, you are left with a super expensive paperweight.
It confuses two things.
1) Having a shite product
2) Taking a holiday to any shite destination
Even if he where available 24/7, the fact remained that it is a lousy concept of a product. In fact it was GOOD he was not available. That way not more people would have lost money.
I understand that you have to be available more while you are in start-up modus, but reloading your energy is a good thing. Otherwise you BECOME the burnout man.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You're missing the point. This topic isn't really about specific individuals taking a vacation.
Sometimes it's like entire organizations are collectively "taking a vacation", and are oblivious to their ongoing downfall.
An example I'm thinking of is moz://a. While they had some success with Firefox about a decade ago, and this landed them some lucrative search deals with Google and then Yahoo, things have gone down hill for them since then.
Firefox has lost a lot of market share. Recent browser stats show it now has only about 4% to 5% of the market. It has 0.04% (not a typo!) of the mobile market. This puts it well behind Chrome, Safari, and UC Browser for Android. So it's quickly becoming irrelevant.
After Firefox, moz://a doesn't really have any products that see much use.
Thunderbird had a number of users, but moz://a essentially gave up on it.
SeaMonkey never had many users to begin with.
Persona was a failure, I think.
Firefox OS was a huge failure, I think. In my opinion it may be one of the biggest software debacles in history.
Bugzilla is pretty much dead.
Servo is failing. I tried a recent build of it about a week ago, and it crashed on me almost immediately. It also had a lot of rendering glitches.
Rust is failing. It had a lot of hype early on, but nothing much came of it. Contemporary new languages like Go and Swift are seeing far more adoption, and are being used for real software systems. C++17 is often a better choice than Rust, too.
Now we see moz://a venturing into idiocy like "battling information pollution", which everybody else just calls censorship.
While all of this is going on, it's like moz://a is oblivious to what's happening. It's like they don't realize that once Firefox is gone, nobody will care what they're doing or what they're working on. Firefox is literally the only thing keeping moz://a relevant, and its market share keeps on shrinking.
It's like the entire organization is "on vacation", and they're unable or unwilling to see what's happening to their organization as it gradually slides into irrelevance.
Nothing could save Juicero bad pricing model. They tried to make money on a 400$ juicer and not the juice, then on top of that, be a super niche market for the rich.
Yeah, 1 week off isn't going to make a difference when a company that already failed.
The chief officer of this retarded hippy juice bag scheme was at Burning Man? You could knock me over with a feather right now.
This was always marketing looking for a way to monetize a subscription as opposed to trying to bring the product that best met the need of the customer to market. There is nothing that anyone can do to save this company. If they still had a few million dollars, they could fire everyone except a few engineers and maybe make a $40 hand press to squeeze their juice packs, but the bottom line is that there are already a number of juicers on the market that can use fruit and vegetables available at any grocery store to give you top quality juice. Oh yeah, and there are a number of companies that sell all kinds of fruit and vegetable juices.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
A fundamental rule about businesses is: you should never have anyone who is actually indispensable. If that person gets hit by a bus, the business is toast -- so a company with one of more indispensable people in it is a company in a weak or precarious position.
If the company really can't do without an exec for a week or so, I take that as a big red flag that the company is, at best, teetering. So let them have their vacation, it's probably not making anything worse.
The people who hired him. No more, no less. I don't care what some CEO of some obscure company does or doesn't do as long as I'm not an investor. It is literally none of my business, or yours (unless you own part of the business) what some guy with the CEO title does.
Anything further is nothing more than class envy... Where the folks who assume all CEO's are corrupt, greedy and bad actors who get too much compensation, are shoveling out their drivel about how unfair things are.
What are we anyway? Socialists? Communist? or Capitalists? Take your pick because you cannot have all three.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
According to "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal" by Nick Bilton, three of the founders snubbed — and later pushed out — the fourth founder by accepting an award at SXSW without him. A later visit to SXSW didn't provide the same bang for the buck to the founders when Twitter was shiny new tech.
delete this 'article' of 'journalism' from slashdot
...I couldn't care less.
Caveat investor.
If venture caps are stupid enough to hand millions to some dipshit without a discernible business plan and a burn rate of nearly $90k PER DAY, that's their idiotic choice. I can't say his 'vanishing' the Burning Man is an iota off-course in terms of my expectations of his personality.
Then again, if I'd lost 7+ figures on his promises, the least I would do is make sure the next 5-6 figures I'd spend would be to have him killed gruesomely as a ...reminder...to other irresponsible developers that ultimately promises matter.
-Styopa
What is this shit doing on the Slashdot front page? It's wrong in every aspect of business management and is just a long way around to say "work good, drugs bad". It's the prose equivalent of Nancy Reagan wearing a nun's outfit having an auditory seizure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You should go hang out in places like Boulder, SF, Santa Fe, etc..., and watch how people spend their money there for a little while. Trust me, there's a market for things like this.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
I sold the bitcoins I had invested in juicero and put them all into the joose loosener.
So I must have imagined everyone griping about the $7 bottled water.
I think this author is taking Juicero far too seriously.
This is like some kid is building a "starship" with legos and you're a grown man criticizing the kid for drinking milk in the assembly area, because you're afraid he might spill some and contaminate the warp drive reactor's sealant ring. Yes, go into depth about how a foreign material can not only prevent the seal from being perfect, but that it might draw kittens into the reactor maintenance tubes, thereby distracting the engineers and increasing the number of workplace safety incidents.
But ... um.. you know it's not a real warp drive, right? It's just lego bricks. We're playing make-believe here. The milk isn't truly endangering anything.
Similarly, suppose the CEO of a manufacturer of an utterly and completely worthless semi-scam product gets high and decides to give up on his current scam and form a Devo tribute band instead. I don't think that would be cause for concern. Believe it not, he doesn't need to be lectured, because it really might not be a bad thing for him to be doing. Relatively, I mean.
Suppose he does take your advice, and he sobers up and gets to work on trying to scam more fuckwits into wasting money on worthless Juiceros. Don't you think you would be doing society a disservice by encouraging that? Just let the kid build his lego starship, dammit!
"Whether you're going to Burning Man, Ibiza, SXSW, or ..."
but this year at Burning Man, there was actually a man burning.
If, at any point in my life, I somehow managed by any possible means to get people to purchase a $400 bag squeezer... I really wouldn't give a shit.
He's already won. Will his empire persist throughout all time and dominate the consumer-grade fruit-bag squeezing market? No? Maybe? Is that even a real market? Who gives a fuck, he managed to dupe a non-insignificant number of people into actually giving him money. This IS the victory scenario. Of course he's going to try and have an exit strategy. This is NOT a long-term company. If anyone for a moment really thought that fruit-bag-squeezer was a legit product, then you deserve to watch your investment burn down in flames. Are you upset your investment isn't pay off? Too bad, you invested in a BAG SQUEEZER.
There's a TON of really stupid startups. There's also a few good ones. If your little baby business can't survive a weekend without someone in constant phone contact, that's a sign that it's fucked. If it's a shitty startup, all it takes is one investor to get their head on straight and realize it's shit. If the founder needs to be in constant contact to maintain that suspension of disbelief, then the company is fucked. If the startup has a legit idea that will make millions, but is working paycheck to paycheck and has the organization of a season of Lost, and every employee has no clue what to do without you there, and it can't survive one weekend without the founder there manually holding together the duck tape and twine contraption, then the company is fucked.
If the company has a real idea. And has some semblance of people knowing what to do. And there isn't some hard contractual obligation deadline. Then the world will continue to turn for a few days without you getting that email. "Hey Bob, you're in charge this weekend, I'm out" That's all that's needed.
And the sad fact is that this message will put an unnerving number of startup types into a cold sweat.
The thing was always a scam (or at least a terrible idea). AvE did a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's not as if a week of this guy Dogug Evans' magic CEO mojo would rescue a fatally flawed business plan. Especially as Evans was no longer CEO at the time. He was chairman, which means he doesn't run the company on a day-to-day basis.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ZING!!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
allow vacation time off. I've only had an entire week off once in the 31 years I've worked as a programmer. Sucks, but at least the pay is nice.
Austin as well. I've seen stores selling $700 single serve cappuccino machines (where the cartridge one pops in has the milk and everything else in it)... and people buy them.
No. Startup founders owe their investors and employees more than the typical 9-5er like you.
You get yo go home to get drunk or play with your kids. They do not.
Plenty of people who attend burning man give their investors and employees a lot more than the typical 9-5; most of them unplug for a week each year and usually investors and employees have notice and they have people covering in their absence. And for all we know, he is attending in order to court an investor. Whether this is responsible or irresponsible in this particular situation we don't know because we don't have all the facts.
One person made a negative comment about someone else on twitter and someone else spun an article about it so people can feel judgy. This is not news for nerds. It's clickbait.
Burning Man is not one of them. If I had CEO pay from something as silly as that, I'd party while it circles the drain too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Just looking at Burning Man pictures makes me want to curl in a corner and take a scolding hot shower to get the filth off.
You are not to tell anybody what to do.
Who gives a fuck, he managed to dupe a non-insignificant number of people into actually giving him money. This IS the victory scenario.
When they announced the shutdown, didn't they also offer refunds on the cost of the juicer ?
If so, I don't see them having much money left in the kitty for it to be considered a victory.
If you get sick
The courts ruled that all European workers are entitled to their full vacation after they have healed:
“A worker who becomes unfit during his paid annual leave, is entitled at a later point to a period of leave of the same duration as that of his sick leave.”
After a week of standing out in the desert, I think most everyone turns some shade of brown. Yay transracialism!
Shit happens and people are out of work all the time. It's nice when it's scheduled like a vacation, but you can also get some sort of infection, break a limb, require surgery, have a family member pass away, have to care for a sick kid or any other of the little curve balls life throws at you. Anyone in a corporate structure (including the CEO) should be able to be out of contact for a week without decision making breaking down. Managers under the CEO should be competent enough to keep their departments humming along for a week, and maybe some truly high level decisions get put off, or the CEO can explicitly appoint someone to make big decisions in their absence. There are plenty of companies and organizations that have done this kind of thing for decades, or in some cases, centuries (or millenia if you include the Catholic Church) at this point.
Three Equifax Managers Sold Stock Before Cyber Hack Revealed https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
should die in a fire.
Do hangovers count? The brits will never run out of vacation time if hungover days count as sick time. Their weekends would be near endless.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Have gnu, will travel.
It is socially acceptable for guys running away with other people's money to go off get high etc., unless they live in the ghetto then they are the most worthless of scum.
He's already won.
He has a paltry net worth of a couple of million, just got ousted as CEO and his startup is on fire sale but more likely facing bankruptcy. Your definition of "won" is very strange.
We're basing an entire article on one real example and then a bunch of wanna-bes?
Let's write an article about how you can tell a company is going to blow up because the first letter in their name is "U". After all, Uber...
He has a ... net worth of a couple of million
HE'S WON BABY!
With a $2 million dollars of stocks you can have an income of (around and averaged to) $200,000/year from stock market gains alone. You can live anywhere in the world and that money still comes in. You don't have to put in a single hour of work. It just happens.
Considering the typical person in the world lives on ~$10,000/year and you'd be making 20x that, for doing nothing other than breathing, I think you've got a VERY strange definition of "paltry". Hell, even in first-world top-dog USA where everyone is rich and the median income is $51,939, you'd still be doing REAL fine just living on the gains from your stocks.
Let me make this abundantly clear: Most people still have to work for a living because they cannot simply choose to get out of the SanFran housing clusterfuck and retire with a big-ass pile of a "paltry" $2,000,000. If I were handed even $1 mil, I'd stop working for someone else and start making the things I WANT to make (or fuck around all day like the unmotivated slob I am, but regardless). If you think having a net worth of $2 mil makes this guy a loser, then you need to go travel the world a little. The parts which don't have a cabana boy with mimosas on hand. You need some perspective. It'll do you good.
At your average start-up, you'd much rather have the CEO doing drugs in the desert rather than in the corner office.
If investors want the startup employees chained to their desks until the "Profit!" stage, they should write that into the agreements up front.
Oh what the hell, mod this AC up. Off-topic rants about Mozilla are always in order.
What we will find out is that running headlong into flames is just a feature of Silicon Valley's latest code development methodology.
Everyone is entitled to have personal time, and everyone in high stress positions needs some escape valve.
Would you judge wall street brokers getting wasted in NY while the crisis rages on? Or would you sinpatjize with their need to take a fucking break. Go launch something big, fail, pivot, be responsible for the livelihood of a couple hundred people and the money of investors and then you can judge a guy trying to have some personal time.
well, i have to keep it short. narrow attention span. etc.
thanks
in the days most crucial for the company's survival (in this case, getting bought out so they can continue to scam).
On the other hand the failure of his company has that much to do to where he choose to spend his vacation time, as to that "Like Nespresso, but with Fruit Juice !" is a very poorly taught-out idea.
It's like a sysape going on a trip right after your company's servers got broken into and wiped, while machines meant for backup are sitting in a closet not even been set up despite having been purchased a year ago.
If the company is so poorly run that there isn't always at least one sysop on call able to handle problems, and that you need to be able to call people back from vacations, then you company is really poorly ran.
A one of the last place I worked, a sysop could without any problem take 1 week vacation in the middle of nowhere with no cell coverage... because there were more than 1 single sysop, and at any time there's always at least 1 of them present at the premise (daytime) or on call (night-time).
The other "not on call at that precise moment" sysops could do pretty much every thing they want on they free time because it's not their job to take emergencies *personally, at that precise moment*.
If the company got their servers borken, you don't call the sysop who is on vacation to fix the, you call *the OTHER* sysop who at that precise moment is supposed to be on call on your plan, and he'll be the one taking the replacement out of the closet and deploying them.
If you don't have such a "who's on call now schedule", then it's your fault, not your sysops.
That would be blaming a big blunder in a large hospital on the fact that their single doctor took vacations.
Who on their right mind would run a whole hospital with a single doctor ?
Same here : if the company isn't organised in such a way that 1 exec can go missing, then it's already a success for failure.
What if the guy was sick or had an accident.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Closer to $100,000 above inflation, but cutting the number in half doesn't really effect your point.