I think I have grown an internal immunity from this bs. (Or maybe I am just older and more mature now).
What does fab do this days anyway?
'Share my enthusiasm but not my profit' and even worse 'write me an essay about that' is more fitting to north corea way of behaving.
This is not the way to keep quality people for long.
I suffered through reading this post which contains such gems as: "Have you ever been clinging onto a rocket ship, then cut the engines at full speed, and then tried to fly again?" because it was on the front page of Hacker News. When I refreshed the site a couple minutes later it was mercifully off the front page.
I'm curious how it got front page to begin with but I'm glad it didn't last long.
In the end I was considering whether the remaining staff are being abused, judged on subjective measures such as being "here for the right reasons", with their jobs under threat no matter how good their work is. It sets a tone of being awfully threatening to the staff, who must already have suffered through the uncertainty.
I was left wondering if any member of Jason's team would dare to give a negative or neutral answer to his question. Did he only publish the answers that he wanted to hear, or did he only get the answers that he wanted to hear.
I'm sure many people on HN would find this an interesting read and it's a shame that this won't be more widely seen.
Then this quote
> I want to build a company that touches millions and millions of people in a positive way and is known as one of the great companies of our time.
This made me think about Steve Job talking to Apple employees at his return. Throwing the Michael Dell quotes at the employees, and telling them that they shouldn't stay for the salaries, and from there it will be as tough as it can be grow back.
Apple is considered a great company, and it touches millions of people in a positive way, my household is full of Apple products. But Steve Jobs was a douchebag, there was the no poach thing going on, there seems to have been a lot of verbal and psychological abuse to reach their level of perfection, and I don't think everyone (the server side guys working on iCloud for instance) were very happy of their jobs.
Some people are attracted by this kind of culture, and I don't deny it can have wonderful results. But is it something to be proud of, and acknowledge as a sane or needed state?
Series A funding investor expectations are for the company to grow/scale. At that & subsequent funding phases the startup should be called a business. Not a startup.
How about why did you convince 750 people to put their faith in you then fumble the ball so badly you had to sack 400 of them...
The post comes across too much like a dad-trying-to-be-cool moment.
"We are a start-up, I need 18 hour days from everybody. Now that we have lost sight of our objectives we need to redouble our efforts!"
And yes, I would demand equity and compensation commensurate with the risk being taken and the effort being put in. No-one is promoting slave labor here.
He even threw in this "No true Scotsman:"
"If you’re a real startup person, this is the best time to be at Fab."
i.e. No true startup-loving engineer would think it's a bad time to be at Fab.
