>There is a great deal of Philip worship on./ >and I can understand this: I used to think like
>you. However I have met the guy and have
>used the ACS extensively and worked with
>many people who know Philip better than
>myself, and it is painfully apparent that
>although he has a great web presence and
>writes convincingly, he's nothing more than a >self important, arrogant prick...
Why "./" rather than "/."? Is this some RPN convention of which I am unaware?
I am having some problems with the "Phil Greenspun is an egotistical egomaniac-loser" line of argument: namely, what does that make the VCs who invested in his company?
When you invest in a company with a "mercurial" founder--and when your company's public reputation and mindshare is based on that mercurial founder's successful self-promotion and his resultant cult--then management job #1 is to keep said mercurial founder happy.
For "professional" managers to so singularly fail at this task--invalidating your company chairman's key card, for God's sake!--would seem to me solid evidence that Greylock doesn't know what it is doing, and is putting people who cannot handle the job into CEO slots...
I would encourage everyone to go read Charles Ferguson's _High Stakes, No Prisoners_. Ferguson had the interesting idea a year or two before everybody else of making a visual html editor and his company's product--Vermeer--is now FrontPage.
From his book and all other accounts, Ferguson is extremely smart, lacks social graces, and can be a paranoid egomaniacal a****** of a magnitude far exceeding what anyone has alleged of Phil Greenspun. (Ferguson accuses his VCs and hired managers not just of being incompetent, but of being all but thieves as well.)
The key difference between Ferguson and Greenspun, however, appears to be that Ferguson was *paranoid*, and because he was paranoid he was able to protect his people and his vision of the company in a way that naive, trusting Philip Greenspun was not. Andy Grove was not kidding when he called his book _Only the Paranoid Survive_
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>There is a great deal of Philip worship on ./ >and I can understand this: I used to think like
>you. However I have met the guy and have
>used the ACS extensively and worked with
>many people who know Philip better than
>myself, and it is painfully apparent that
>although he has a great web presence and
>writes convincingly, he's nothing more than a >self important, arrogant prick...
Why "./" rather than "/."? Is this some RPN convention of which I am unaware?
I am having some problems with the "Phil Greenspun is an egotistical egomaniac-loser" line of argument: namely, what does that make the VCs who invested in his company?
When you invest in a company with a "mercurial" founder--and when your company's public reputation and mindshare is based on that mercurial founder's successful self-promotion and his resultant cult--then management job #1 is to keep said mercurial founder happy.
For "professional" managers to so singularly fail at this task--invalidating your company chairman's key card, for God's sake!--would seem to me solid evidence that Greylock doesn't know what it is doing, and is putting people who cannot handle the job into CEO slots...
I would encourage everyone to go read Charles Ferguson's _High Stakes, No Prisoners_. Ferguson had the interesting idea a year or two before everybody else of making a visual html editor and his company's product--Vermeer--is now FrontPage.
From his book and all other accounts, Ferguson is extremely smart, lacks social graces, and can be a paranoid egomaniacal a****** of a magnitude far exceeding what anyone has alleged of Phil Greenspun. (Ferguson accuses his VCs and hired managers not just of being incompetent, but of being all but thieves as well.)
The key difference between Ferguson and Greenspun, however, appears to be that Ferguson was *paranoid*, and because he was paranoid he was able to protect his people and his vision of the company in a way that naive, trusting Philip Greenspun was not. Andy Grove was not kidding when he called his book _Only the Paranoid Survive_