
Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software - mostafah
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-of-fog-creek-software/
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chollida1
Wow Stack Overflow has 300 employees!!

So at a typical benchmark of $500,000 of revenue per employee they should be
making atleast $150,000,000 per year in revenue. I have to imagine that they
are making much more than that, given that I've seen valuations of $500
million.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-
apple...](http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple-
facebook-google-others-2016-2)

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are still
very lean and well run, I'm a big fan, but the fact that they do data dumps
makes me feel much better.

I've seen too many bankruptcy/wind downs of companies, and one thing you can
usually bet on is that once that process starts, the data gets locked up and
treated the same as any other asset, which is to say, sold to pay debts. Or
put another way, once a company gets into trouble, releasing their data often
gets taken off the table as an option.

Again as a reminder to startup employee's, the company was founded in 2008 and
hasn't really had any talk about going public or selling, so always make sure
you get atleast a market salary from any startup you join as your options even
at a well run company could take more than a decade to provide you with
liquidity.

 __EDIT __I can 't math

~~~
bearcobra
Is $500,000 a common benchmark? A couple of quick searches seemed to show
$100-300K for tech companies with a $1 billion valuation. My current employer
has something like 315 employees, and while I'm not privy to their financials
or our investors projections, the thought of hitting that kind of revenue
target is bonkers to me.

~~~
nostrademons
Benchmark for the big-5 is about $1M/employee/year in revenue. FB is about
$1.2M, GOOG is just over $1M, AAPL is $1.8M, MSFT is $740K, AMZN is $460K (but
recall that they have a large warehouse staff and with their 3rd-party
sellers, they only recognize revenue off the fees charged to the seller and
not off GMV). That's how they can afford to pay $400K+ total comps, and why
they're sucking the atmosphere out of the engineering hiring market.

It can vary a lot by industry. A number of recent unicorns are glorified
restaurants or retail shops that happen to deliver their product over the web
or smartphone. Their revenue/employee numbers are going to be much lower
because they don't have any significant proprietary technology to build an
economic moat around, and their employees cost less.

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owenwil
Anil is a kind, thoughtful person and one of the few people in technology who
will go out of his way to make time for you and genuinely get to know you
without an agenda or need for a value exchange - I really admire that. We
spent an afternoon wandering New York the time I met him, and he's truly
constantly considering how he can impact the world in a meaningful way.

This is really, really cool, and he's a great fit for the job - along with the
talented team over there. Super excited about this, personally.

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danso
I think of Dash as very respected in media, and I think of Fog Creek as being
as the "engineers' company", so was surprised to see him CEO of Fog Creek and
Joel CEO of StackOverflow. If anything, I would've thought it'd be vice versa?
It's a testament to what a game-changer StackOverflow is in terms of
information-design-for-humans that it could be capably headed by someone like
Dash as much as Spolsky.

But if Fog Creek Software is tasked with coming up with more products and
software-as-services, I would've thought that Spolsky would be more fit for
that, even if StackOverflow is the biggest piece of the pie? (I admit to
knowing little of how executive structures work though)

~~~
kristianc
I think there's something in the idea of putting people in roles where they
balance out other people's strengths and weaknesses.

Fog Creek probably doesn't lack for smart engineering people, but might
benefit from someone who has a wider view on media and society in general - as
well as enterprise sales, which Spolsky calls out specifically. Tech people
and engineers, on the whole, loathe enterprise sales.

Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan at HubSpot spring to mind two guys who you
might not ordinarily put together but they've both got a big role, and it's
the same kind of deal. Shah is an engineer and a hacker, Halligan is more of
an old-school sales guy.

The reason why this is a smart move is the same reason why it is
counterintuitive.

~~~
santoshalper
Fog Creek has always been an extremely well managed company but very quiet.
They could use the press and marketing savvy upgrade.

~~~
noir_lord
Agreed, Fog Creek has been fascinating to watch over the years, back then (and
now) they seemed to follow a completely different path to building a software
company and the incredible detail they put into developer experience, I used
to love watching their YouTube channel when it was about their internal
setup/staffing etc.

Was always a dream to build a company like that, one day maybe.

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devnonymous
...as an aside, out of curiosity, does anyone know why the "...and the company
goes away." phrase was linked to www.towerrecordsmovie.com specifically and
how is that related to Fog Creek ?

~~~
chiph
Tower Records was so wrapped up in selling physical goods (CDs and earlier,
LPs) that they were totally blindsided by the rapid change in listener
preferences. They didn't react quickly enough, soon enough, as sales fell off
a cliff thinking it a temporary correction instead of a fundamental change.

So the lesson is that once a company has "made it" they should diversify so
that they aren't dependent on a single income stream.

You should totally watch the film, btw. I used to shop at the Watt Avenue
store in Sacramento, and the breadth of titles they carried was amazing.
Easily five times the product that a store like Sam Goody would carry, and in
niches you'd never see anywhere else. If there were such a thing as Celtic
Rap, Tower Records would have carried it.

~~~
Yhippa
You had me curious so I looked it up. There is in fact at least one Celtic Rap
group out there:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manau_(group)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manau_\(group\)).

~~~
chiph
Of course there had to be one. :)

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devy
For Creek Software is interesting and unique in that each product they develop
has a CEO!

~~~
rkcr
Fog Creek Software, Stack Overflow and Trello are all separate companies.

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kevinstubbs
What are the pros and cons of Fog Creek spinning out its successful products
into separate companies, rather than the typical model of simply keeping them?

~~~
rkcr
Joel's article on the Trello spinoff is instructive:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2014/07/24/trello-
inc/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2014/07/24/trello-inc/)

tl;dr - Gave investors the ability to invest solely in Trello instead of all
of Fog Creek.

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anamoulous
Does Fog Creek have a diversity report card yet?

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EddieSpeaks
Anil is a bit difficult even if you accidentally disagree with him on
politics, for a capitalist CEO he can be very left wing at times.

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howfun
What is Joel going to do?

~~~
devopsproject
make snarky comments about how people still cannot seem to read the article
before asking a question answered in said article?

