
Crowdflower CEO: My Board Fired Me. Here's What I Learned - nogaleviner
http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2014/12/08/my-board-fired-me-heres-what-i-learned/
======
curtis
> Ask for stories, not advice. Every piece of advice has a more memorable and
> interesting story behind it. ... When someone starts giving you generic
> advice, ask them for the real story behind it. Then, you can decide if the
> advice is relevant to you.

This advice (ahem) seems like it might be generally applicable. If you read
the full quote, you will also find that it comes with its own stories!

------
throwthevcaway
The impression I get from this post is that there was a lot more going on
behind the scenes. That the author's board and investors didn't support him
remaining CEO the first time around gives a strong tell of an immature
investor. Yes, people change and come around to sensibilities, but it's not
like he's a brand new person coming back to the helm.

Those changes could have been made by a board who had fanatical support for
the vision and the leader. I seriously doubt Crowdflower's board provided that
support the first time, given they canned him like they did.

What everyone should learn from this is that picking the wrong investors when
you get funded is the worst possible thing you can do to your company and
yourself.

------
yzzxy
It's good he wasn't tacky enough to make a Steve Jobs allegory... but then
Forbes did it for him anyway.

Interesting read, I've used Crowdflower in the past and have had a much better
experience than when I tried to use MTurk. However, I was lucky enough to
avoid a platform use fee so I'm guessing that's how they can subsidize a lot
of the overhead like UI that's not directly related to day-to-day
infrastructure.

------
mathattack
I'm not sure I follow the story. He was fired or demoted? And now he's back as
the CEO again?

~~~
MediaSquirrel
He was fired by his VCs. Then they fired his replacement and brought him back.

~~~
mathattack
Ahhh. Sounds like he came back with some humility. Good for him!

------
goombastic
Every time someone describes themselves as a leader and organizes their life
around "leading," I do a double take. I feel most of these type of
personalities are too self centered and difficult to work with. It becomes
obvious that they will be blind sided.

------
pherocity_
Asking for stories over advice is equally short sighted, and isn't going to go
any better in the long run. Just because something worked for Bill at
UltraTech doesn't mean it's going to work for you at PunchStarter.

------
curiously
Crowdflower is _expensive_. The contributors are filled with bad contributors
(even after turning off the partner networks individually (accuracy of 97%) to
justify the 20~30% mark up in fees when you could just use Mechanical Turk.

The fact that you can't just fund your account and use the amount from it. If
you want to launch several jobs, you need to cover for the overrun fee which
is very annoying if you need to test many tasks and you can't afford to wait
30min~1hr until the funds become available to you again.

All in all, I found Crowdflower was just a very expensive and time consuming
overhead and the benefit was far too marginal to be worth the cost.

I'd say avoid all these "platforms" they are nothing more than a complicated
form generator which you could simply use a 3rd party tool to do that for you.

~~~
avemuri
You may want to take a look at SquadRun. Based out of India, much cheaper.
[https://squadrun.co/business/](https://squadrun.co/business/)

Full disclosure: the founder is a friend.

~~~
curiously
do you have an email address I can reach your friend by?

~~~
avemuri
apurv [at] squadrun.co

