A Cautionary Tale - Anonymous employee Endgame Employee Review

Endgame should be a chapter in the follow up to Ben Horowitz's book The hard thing about hard things. This company is a cautionary tale in a startup being taken over by consultants with no experience working in or running a software company. The ever-so-important transition from Founder CEO, to Business CEO could not have been executed more poorly. Let's look at the red flags: 1. No identifiable problem to solve. A lot of talented engineers without a true captain steering the ship. A business CEO with no experience in a software company, has no place trying to find "the next great disruptive thing to build" 2. MBA type management - Harvard degrees do not equate to successful technology companies. Give me a strong technical leader any day of the week 3. Carousel of Management - I have never seen a single company make more poor hiring decisions in my entire career. That isn't the worst part...recognize your mistake and move on. The bogus "Fail Fast" written on the corporate headquarters is just that, words on a wall. When the entire company knows that a member of senior leadership is a terrible fit, the exec team should recognize that as well, and make the changes needed. 4. Busyness is not effectiveness - Watching the executive team run around on a daily basis, as if there was something important going on was hilarious. It was a convenient way of avoiding the fact that they didn't know what we should be focused on, or how we would get there. 5. Raising the same amount of money over and over and over. If your company raises the same amount, in this case a respectable 29million, over (series A), and over (Series B), and over (series C)...wait for it...theres a D coming.....then you are not growing. Each time you're getting a lower tier investor to tag along on the heels of the investor before them. 6. Lesson to the kids out there....just because you ran an infantry platoon in the marines doesn't mean you have any business running a technology company