

Start the REvolution without me... - bensummers
http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog/2009/10/start-the-revolution-without-me.html

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swombat
Well, that sure sounds like a funding deal that fucked up majorly. The entire
founding team, board, and most of the company was fired right after doing a
funding round and bringing in a new CEO and COO? What kind of fucked up VC did
that?

<http://www.nbvp.com/>, that's who. Now, I don't know if this story is true,
but if it is, it should serve as a huge flashing neon warning sign to any
other entrepreneurs to stay well away from North Bridge Venture Partners.

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grellas
A clear risk of any funding involving a control shift but especially so when
dealing with second- or third-tier VCs who are in it only for the money and
have no reputation to protect.

I have seen this happen as well with acquisitions in which the founders are
assured that they will be able to earn out their main reward over time only to
be terminated shortly after the closing.

Legal protections (usually, for founders only and not for other employees) are
available in both cases to help limit the damage but a surprisingly large
number of founders are willing to forego them when they are assured in ever so
reassuring tones that they can "trust" the party that will have control.
Unfortunately, trust doesn't work in most such cases.

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swombat
Well, based on this article, NBVP definitely does not have any reputation left
to protect...

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NEPatriot
Well it's nice to see they score 2/5 on:
[http://www.thefunded.com/funds/show/North+Bridge+Venture+Par...](http://www.thefunded.com/funds/show/North+Bridge+Venture+Partners)

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trevelyan
Second round of funding at almost 8-digits for an open source software company
that is losing money? If I was running the business I'd have done exactly what
the investors did: cull anything non-core, focus on creating revenue, and
bring in someone with experience building a business (looks like they brought
in the founder of SPSS).

If the people who think they've been screwed here really believe in the value
of what they're doing, they have a great opportunity to simply fork the
project. Lots of people would kill for this type of PR! If they're not willing
to do this because they are incapable of bringing a business to profitability
or need funding, they should hardly be complaining about the actions of their
investors.

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tptacek
Someone want to give the rest of us the Cliff's Notes on what this company did
and what this person did for that company?

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noodle
executive summary, based on my reading:

this person was on one of the core developer evangelist groups to push R out
into the hands of the early adopters and get people using it.

the company got funded and they immediately fired this group, despite promises
they wouldn't, and shifted the company's focus towards the enterprise level.

~~~
swombat
I don't think Thomas was asking for a summary of the article. He was asking
for a summary of the stuff that's not being mentioned in the article, all the
surrounding circumstances that can turn this from a sour grapes story to a
full-on funding scandal.

~~~
noodle
fair enough, although thats not how i read it.

don't know how many neutral parties with sufficient knowledge there are that
would be willing to talk about things not mentioned, though.

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staunch
> _"We built a small team to work on "Community Engineering"..._

> _"We set up an Advisory Board designed to advise REvolution management about
> decisions relating to REvo and Open Source..."_

Honestly, this sounds fluffy feel-good bureaucratic big-company bullshit to
me, the kind of thing that has no place in a startup. Maybe the new CEO is a
really smart guy...

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earl
Um... yes and no. In general, I'm with you -- that's sort of a very open job
description and it's hard to figure out what the responsibilities are.

OTOH: R is an open source project. Maintaining good relations with the many
people who contribute to R is pretty key to a company in this space. Also
important is talking people into using R instead of the many (SAS, SPSS,
Stata, Eviews, Matlab, gauss) alternatives. Pushing themselves as open source
plus extras seems to be their business model. There seems like there should be
somebody around who talks to the communities of developers and users.

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NEPatriot
They have more lawyers... with bigger stacks of papers. Unless it's in writing
in these things assume the worst is coming.

