Comment by lenerdenator
Comment by lenerdenator 2 days ago
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
Comment by lenerdenator 2 days ago
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
> It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
My understanding is that the investors signed proxy voting rights over to Matt. They are mostly ordinary shares, and may be revocable. [1]
Let this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
Same with trading your time for stock options (that you hope are eventually negotiable shares); trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
Dilution is a real problem. If they want you to act like a Founder, you should have protected equity like one.
For the unaware (or under-aware): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi
Probably apocryphal. A lot of people these days only know it from Star Wars.
wait, did he put his name in the company name?
if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
Knowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell.
If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
i don't think that is how a tell works. of course now we know. hindsight and all that.
to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side.
the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.
Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.
It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.
There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.
I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
Yeap, Automatic is not a good trade name but Automattic is great!
Yes but this isn't really much of a crime or tell to me. The name is great as far as I'm concerned.
And he's full of himself and completely wrong in this crusade he launched for some reason, completely indefensible acts left & right for over a year.
Both true.
Yes. He also calls the employees Automatticians. So they're all just Matt.
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.