
A Second Tour as C.E.O. - davidu
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/jobs/06boss.html
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jefe78
Yes, yes you do! So good, I finally decided to sign up for a Deluxe account
after years as a free user(for my personal network), just because of the
story! ZipGrid will be a proud user of OpenDns!

How did the new round of investors come to the decision to ultimately promote
you(your passion aside)? Were they having a hard time finding a replacement or
did they feel you'd been wrongly demoted?

EDIT: I'm a longtime user, but I think you should consider adding a demo page
so people don't need to register to see what they're missing.

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davidu
Thanks, and good feedback on the need for a demo -- we're revamping the
website now, it's long overdue.

In regards to your question: I was intimately involved in the fundraising
process, having already known Sequoia Capital before they invested. So I knew
those guys. When they invested, the former CEO was still CEO. About 5 months
into their investment the CEO and the company parted ways and I immediately
took over in an interim role.

After our first board meeting when I took over as interim CEO the board
already seemed pleased with the immediate changes I had made and reminded me
that all CEOs are interim CEOs and I should just continue to operate as CEO --
there would be no replacement search.

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Bud
Congrats on the NYT article. That's got to feel great, in addition to being
great publicity.

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davidu
How did the title of my post get changed?

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StavrosK
Hmm, I don't understand how an investor can demote you as CEO of your own
company. Can someone explain?

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staunch
He gave up legal control of the company in order to get investment money. It's
most likely that the board of directors controlled the company, and the
investors controlled the board.

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StavrosK
Oh, I see, thanks. So, as I understand it, he had just one vote on the board,
and thus couldn't veto the decision. Thanks for the clarification.

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davidu
Something like that... :-)

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sskates
Sorry, I missed the connection the article has to getting fired.

Congrats on the article, by the way.

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davidu
Being out of the drivers seat made me realize all the things that I wasn't
doing when I was CEO, and which were still not being done the way I thought
they should be. But it was easier to see on the outside.

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hinathan
Good media, David — glad to see things still going strong at OpenDNS.

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GFischer
I find a paywall when trying to access the article.

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memetichazard
Try going at it through google.
[http://www.google.ca/search?q=I+make+getting+fired+look+good...](http://www.google.ca/search?q=I+make+getting+fired+look+good.+:-))

Hm, not sure how to include that ) in the URL, but the shorted search term
works anyways.

~~~
jkuria
thanks for this!

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tastybites
_I GREW up in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. I got my first job the
summer after eighth grade at a small Internet service provider. I called the
owner, Christopher Alan, one day and asked if he had a summer internship or a
job, and he took a chance on me. My mother would drive me to the train, and
I’d take along my skateboard to go from the San Diego train station to the
office._

Reading stuff like this is so surreal because it nearly mirrors my own
experience starting out. I got my first job through a local linux users group
mailing list (CEO took a chance on me to do sysadmin and scripting work) - my
mom had to drive me to work after school and pick me up in the middle of the
night after I was done.

Now I run a business and when I look back, it's astonishing how large a chance
it really is to hire a kid who can't even drive to write software for your
business. The 1990s truly were crazy.

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davidu
I have interns now, and I love having them. I don't think it was because of
the 90s. Good interns (who have good mentors) have the heart and passion and
remind me why I love doing what I do. Keep in mind that I started my
internship in like 95 or 96 -- long before the dot-com craze really took off.
:-)

And FWIW, I think internships are totally underrated. Whenever I saw my
friends in high school spending their summer dicking around it always boggled
my mind, even more so in college.

I never was an A+ student (though I did okay) but I did always have jobs and
worked my ass off when it counted.

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tastybites
I was also a mediocre student because I was usually out with friends or in
front of a computer... although I did somehow end up going to UCSD - you must
be talking about the solana beach amtrak station in the article right? :) I
took the Surfliner home to Ventura county many times during my 4 years in SD.

Either way though, I just think (could be wrong) it's much more rare to find
high school kids doing "real" work these days, like admining production
servers or writing software that ships to customers.

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sliverstorm
I would agree with you, it's getting harder and harder for high school kids to
find work other than customer service in retail joints.

~~~
davidu
If they are able to get to the Caltrain station in San Francisco (which we are
next to), they should email david (at) opendns.com and apply to be an intern.

All interns are paid.

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spankythemonk
Cool story bro!

