
Why I got fired as President and co-founder of Udemy, a now-$2B unicorn - dsr12
https://twitter.com/gaganbiyani/status/1273647736026542080
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gigatexal
A terrible employee at the first startup I joined (see racist, anger issues,
etc) caused a lot of us to leave. If you're going to run a team, nay, if
you're going to work with people it pays to invest in some people skills.

~~~
ksaj
A startup I worked at for a short while was run by a guy who wouldn't stop
trying to convince me he was the real Satoshi. Also he was in several
different wars, and was shot through the chest back-to-front with a scud
missile. Oh, and his girlfriend was part djinn (a real-world genie!). He was
fighting with the military because they apparently lost all record of him
having ever even served as Special Ops. Amazing. He was, by far, the
scrawniest "ex-military" guy I've ever met.

I quit, still unable to tell if he actually had a product, or if he was
stringing on his investors. What I did find was a whole lot of plagiarism in
what looked to be the code for his product. Take the code from a book on Proto
Lisp programming and sprinkle in a bit of Rigetti's work liberally, and voila,
originality! I'm betting the money guys aren't going to be happy with him for
long, if they are still funding him. He just frustrated me so much I gave up
on a whole lot of money just to avoid having to listen to his nonsense
anymore. It was frankly quite embarrassing having to pretend I was interested
in his stories, considering how fictional and bizarre everything he had to say
was.

Apparently months after I left, he was ejected by police from his office
space. I never heard what actually caused it, but police aren't usually
involved in landlord/tenant issues, and he definitely had enough money for the
rent anyway.

I don't know how people like these manage to get funded in the first place.
But now he's still pretending to be an expert in quantum mechanics from his
kitchen table. I feel sorry for anyone that gets sucked into his "startup."

~~~
kazinator
Military guy with a genie girlfriend. Now where did he come up with _that_
idea?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie)

~~~
ksaj
Wow... I hadn't made that connection. You've both helped make sense of his
altered reality, and made it weirder at the same time. I think you are
probably right.

