Founders at Work.pdf

Philip Greenspun 331
bad company, actually. They never had a really good product, and I don’t think
their customers were very well served. If you are going to get a manager, it’s
probably better to get somebody from GE Jet Engines because, at the end of
the day, the customer who buys a GE jet engine gets value. It’s a high-quality
product. They at least have that kind of culture of building something reasonable
for the customer.
Livingston: Did you like and approve the hire of this new CEO?
Greenspun: I liked this guy reasonably well, but a lot of it was desperation.
I really didn’t like what my job had become. Until the company had about
40 people, it was a lot of fun. I felt like work was getting done that I would have
done if I’d had more time. It was being done in my style and to my quality standards.
It was like being pushed along by this tide of helpers.
But at the time of the VC investment, we had 80 people, and I thought,
“Things are beginning to get done that I wouldn’t have done.” Some of my
cofounders and more experienced folks were also stretched pretty thin because
of the growth. I thought, “We just need the insta-manager solution.” Which, in
retrospect, is ridiculous. How could someone who didn’t know anything about
the company, the customers, and the software be the CEO?
Our customers weren’t hiring us to be management experts; they wanted a
really good programming team to build something of high-quality and deliver it
quickly. They didn’t need anyone to talk smooth to them. A lot of the traditional
skills of a manager were kind of irrelevant when you only have two or threeperson
teams building something. So it was almost more like you were better
off hiring a process control person or factory quality expert instead of a big
executive type.
They brought in a new executive team very quickly, and I acceded to this
because I knew that my skills weren’t in management and, in theory, somebody
else could have done just as good a job as CEO. But apparently nobody could
do quite as good a job at making the engineering decisions on the toolkit. Jin
and I and a few other experienced engineers—we knew what worked, we knew
what didn’t work—we should be concentrating on the product.
The CEO was a guy who had never been a CEO of any organization before,
and he brought in his friend to be CFO. His buddy didn’t have an accounting
degree and he was really bad with numbers. He couldn’t think with numbers,
he couldn’t do a spreadsheet model accurately. That generated a lot of acrimony
at the board meetings. I would say, “Things are going badly.” And he’d
say, “Look at this beautiful spreadsheet. Look at these numbers; it’s going
great.” In 5 minutes I had found ten fundamental errors in the assumptions of
this spreadsheet, so I didn’t think it would be wise to use it to make business
decisions. But they couldn’t see it. None of the other people on the board were
engineers, so they thought, “Well, he’s the CFO, so let’s rely on his numbers.”
Having inaccurate numbers kept people from making good decisions.
They just thought I was a nasty and unpleasant person, criticizing this guy’s
numbers, because they couldn’t see the errors. From an MIT School of
Engineering standpoint, they were all innumerate.