Yep you are right for the snark. Still, "valid point" is very subjective. I'll think about it, yet I do not have any improvement in mind to preserve space, breathing and readability.
To be fair, it seems the site is his personal blog as well [1], well before he started the homonymous company.
It's still a garish design anti-pattern, nonetheless. All this baroque excess of late with gigantic fonts in the name of "space" and "readability" really needs to stop.
Oh I understand better the critique now: yes it is my personal blog (the initial startup website does not exist anymore). I refreshed the design recently (like, 2 weeks ago).
I used http://lamb.cc/typograph/ with a "Le Corbusier" scale to calculate the font size, the paddings and margins etc.
So the size does not come out nowhere, it has been made for readability and as my eyesight decreased, I found the change much welcome… I will try to find a good balance to end up your sufferings ;-)
Nice, thank you for the reference to the typography tool you used [1]; I didn't know about Le Corbusier's proportions.
The discussion in [1] on "vertical tempo" is interesting because I think that is precisely the problem with your site. Your body font size is large but within currently fashionable standards [2] at around 10 words or 60 characters per line; but the headings and subheadings are so huge they are breaking the vertical flow of the page.
On my iPad, for instance, it currently takes me an unreasonably long 27 (!) full screens to scroll down to the end of the article, not counting the header (another full screen) nor the comments section. And often the subheading alone occupies the entire screen. With such huge disparity between body and headings size, it makes little difference whether both sizes come from the same proportional scale or not: the sheer size difference is perceived as out of proportion nonetheless.
This sounds like a pretty typical trajectory for a failed startup: CEO dreams big, encourages sales guys to chase big fish through the commission structure, but meanwhile the big fish demand more features, guarantees, complex contracts, etc. than 15 smaller customers would. I've seen it happen quite a bit; and it's one of the biggest (and most common) mistakes that B2B software startups make.
An early-stage company really needs two things from its customers: cash flow and feedback. It's fine if you don't make any profits, but you need revenue coming in the door to get future rounds of funding. It's fine if your revenue per customer is lower than you would like. Small customers are great at both: price it low enough to start that it's not a huge business expense for them, and you will be able to deal directly with the people who will use the system. If they have a problem, your product guys will know and be able to relay it to development.
Big customers often get you neither. They require lengthy contract negotiations that will rack up thousands in lawyer's fees from your side before you bring in any revenue. They ask for features that aren't core to your product and are likely years down on your roadmap (think LDAP authentication, customer admin functionality, audit logs, etc.) Again, these have to be developed before they sign a contract and before you see money. If you actually manage to get them into a production environment, they're much less likely to give you actionable feedback.
tl;dr: B2B software startups that target big contracts are much more likely to fail because the market dynamics of chasing after big customers will increase your burn rate while diverting your sales team's attention from smaller fish.
Yes, I've heard (and experienced) most of this. It's still good to hear it again, though, and being from another country we can learn that some mistakes are universal.
EDIT: Joel's Camels and Rubber Duckies[1] is essential reading for how hard it is to sell enterprise software. Price it free, cheap, or dear. Not to say that there is no hope in selling to enterprises, because lots of people are very successful doing it, but you need to know how hard it is before you start.
Hey guys these are excellent feedbacks! I discovered too late this behaviour was typical, and you confirm it even more… I wish we had sought this kind of trustful insights beforehand.
We actually thought our lawyer was helping us but you know, he was a "close friend" with the CEO so the game rules were a bit faked.
Yeah, it can be hard to know some of the core things like market entry strategy without having been burned before. Even if you get the strategy right, setting up your sales and marketing plan (compensation, market profile, etc.) such that it implements your strategy is also a challenge. My belief is you should never have commissioned sales people in a young software startup; always pay them on a salary + bonus structure with bonus targets that reflect your strategic priorities (i.e. number of customers, revenue per customer, etc.) These can and will change frequently as you "pivot" your product development.
It's not impossible to sell software to enterprises, but they shouldn't be your first target customers for a number of reasons. First, any enterprise problem that is valuable to your potential customer probably already has a solution available from their ERP vendor (e.g. Oracle, SAP or IBM). If your prospect chooses not to go with that solution, price is likely the issue; so you are selecting price-sensitive customers. Second, you will likely have to integrate with an ERP system, which will likely confuse your Rails developers because ERP systems are ass-backwards and make no sense.
It also becomes a lot easier to sell your product to a big customer if you already have a lot of little customers. But selling software to big customers will require a lot of custom integration work: you need to have the scale to be able to provide integration services to them while still supporting your existing customers.
Enterprise customers should absolutely be a goal of any B2B software startup, but not early on. Early on you want to focus on the customers that are easier to please, and make a kick-ass product for them. Once you have built that product, you can start to scale it up to larger customers and get the feature integration right. You also shouldn't be afraid to say "no" if approached by a potential big customer because your product isn't ready for them.
In my experience working on an enterprise software product, it's not so much that price drives them away from Oracle/SAP/IBM/..., but a perceived lack of value or ROI. Competing on value instead of price is definitely possible in a B2B context (although to be fair some companies are just cheapskates and will always buy the cheapest product).
Well, all other things held equal, most customers would prefer to buy from an existing vendor (one throat to choke and all). Given the nature of most RFPs for this kind of software it's hard to win on value since the requirements are laid out in advance; so you almost have to win on price. The danger of winning one of these contracts is that SAP/Oracle/IBM all know how difficult their ERP systems are to integrate with, and if you can under-price them, you're likely underestimating that cost.
Basically, there's a lot that can go wrong and you need to have a certain scale before you even attempt to go after the big whales. You shouldn't be trying to work with them while building out the basic version of your product.
From my experience, the problem is that when your strategy is chasing big customers v. small ones, the customers you often end up with are the worst of both worlds - they are large enough to act like big customers (want contracts and features outside the scope of what you are working on), but will only be looking to pay prices that small companies need. I worked at a company in that spot for a while. In SaaS, sales teams can play a big role, but until you have a pretty decent cashflow, it makes more sense to me to have them focus much more on inbound sales (and account management) than outbound, which is a very different sales model. Eventually, once you hit a certain size, you probably need a real sales team, since that's what will close the real big fish. But before you go after them, make sure you have enough cash flow that your boat doesn't sink before they can reel them in (to continue the fishing metaphor).
When I worked at Pearson, I was often at the other end of the transaction in these situations. We required LDAP, hosted local admin, and a few other enterprise-y features that don't play well with cloud startups. But it was essentially window shopping.
I would often interact with a startup where the sales guy was fired on the other end because they just didn't understand that we were doing a 3-6 month competitive technical evaluation (in addition to our more important day-to-day work) after I'd clearly explained it a few times. No amount of "sales" will make up for a lack of required, costly-to-build features. Also, the answer to missing features is rarely ever "wait for them to be built."
The process has been initiated way before (a year before actually). It took 4 months to get the money because the business plan and everything has been made for the company launch.
Think of:
1. 2010: the project initiated with the preparation of the business plan with public funding in mind;
2. september 2011: the company launched because the funding project has been audited and validated, which means 99% chances for the funding to be approved;
It's beyond me how a startup can drain 500K€ in 6 months.. Yes, he gives some details where the money went (mostly flushed down the toilet), but I just can't understand why a startup, that is generating little to no revenue, waste so much money.
I think this is tight to the personality of the guys allowing the expenses. In that case, the "I want to make sure you don't need my money" investor advice makes a lot of sense: they want to make sure your head is not going to burn because of the euphoria effect. Yesterday you had 0, today you have millions.
On another scale, you have people unable to manage a daily budget. This is the same on a (wrong) business scale.
500K isn't that much money if you're not supplementing it with revenues. 11 salaries burn cash fast if you're paying market rates, even if paying 5k per month per employee then just on salary costs you only have 10 months of runway. Thats nothing. This team should have been leaner and product focused with that 500k and their goal should have been a product that they could spin into a second round of funding.
The top salaries were roughly 3K€ per month. Officially and speaking for myself. Without the detailed accountancy we can only speculate about it.
We built a working software using Node.js and Chrome Extensions in less than 3 months, to reach that second stage of funding.
As our baseline was not clear, our market not proven and probably because of the investors suspicions, we never got an answer (well he had: "we'll see later").
I forgot to mention this product was based on scientific research about graph theories and user behaviours in an established society.
From science to market, another challenge as one needs to distinguish the scientific interest of a feature vs. a sellable feature on a business market.
Regardless of how much you have, you have to stretch that money for a longer runway than 6 months, especially in B2B. Even if you were selling stuff that turns everything it touches into gold, after 6 months you still wouldn't have gotten through all the sales processes to actual cash in bank, the B2B sales process simply doesn't work that fast.
Yep you are right, this is part of the wrong income/outcome balance. The Head of marketing said she could not handle the load so we needed to hire someone else. We were mitigated about that.
The hiring has been made against our will, and we could not prevent it to happen (again, 52% shares by the CEO, all the power in a unique pair of hands etc.)
The number of analysts is wrong as well: especially when you lack of customers. Hirings have been made in case of signing the huge contracts in the process of being signed.
An attempt to scale too early, with blurry indicators which made us thinking we eventually needed them.
Anyway, considering how much money was burnt every months, it would not have saved us much more than 1 or 2 extra months.
You seem to charge solely the CEO for the failure of the company and you may be right. But you can't be the number 2 of a company and not taking your part of responsibility. Does your innovation was truly disruptive? Maybe not. Do you provide awesome products that make customers' eyes cry? Maybe not.
In you area of work, you seem to be in charge of products and research. Where are the results of the research? Where are the products? Where the open-source projects? You seem to forget why you got money, time and public subsidies. You seem to forget to explain why you guys were disruptive.
Your only fault cannot be to not confront the ceo sooner.
OK, here is the first 40% of my (light) edit of the original post. This took about 90 minutes which is longer than I thought it would. The rest can be done Sunday...
OP: is this too far from your inner voice, what you intended? Is the edit worth finishing?
I'm having to link to the text file as HN says the 1200 word extract is too long.
The author mentions quite a few times how he/she ignored lots of problems, from the very beginning -- the CEO was far too full of buzzwords, etc..
This was also apparently a product that could gather a complicated mass of data that would be valuable, but difficult to use.
I'm not sure of how it should balance mea culpa with "he did it", exactly, but the author certainly doesn't come across as free of guilt over the failure.
Fair point, especially as I thought I have been acknowledging my mistakes enough. They are concentrated in the "Ignoring problems" part, mainly.
I blame myself to have ignored the problems, and not to have acted on them. The overconfidence as well: I thought we would know soon enough if we needed to stop. For a zero loss operation.
If we follow that direction, I would have never accepted to join the project.
I have been naive enough and my lack of experience did not help me to react properly, and in time. That's what happens when you play with grown up people, on your own and without requesting neutral advices ;-)
Also, I have challenged the CEO (and his partner, she was a cofounder and the head of marketing… yes I simplified the problem not to report the failure on people but rather on the behaviours)… it is just it is technically very difficult to trigger something when you have 6% of the shares, and when all the powers are concentrated in one person.
Which means that if he wanted something, he could have it. Even firing me for no real reason (when you have an R&D gov discount in France you can fire anyone related to R&D).
I did not relate it much as well but everything was fine on the technical side. At least the process and the everyday life. This, has been my best work experience: we open sourced/improved Node.js libraries as much as we could (and eventually became friend with the sigma.js author).
Maybe it was useless but surveying the whole insurance market through online opinions mining for a specific country in less than two day is somewhat valuable for whom is able to pay you for those data ;-)).
PS: I am not a native English speaker so any feedback to correct the mistakes are welcome. There is a "Contribute" link at the end of the article: open a PR ;-)
I think the fact that at it sounds like you weren't getting the accounts (at least cash flow and bank balances) so that you could see the lack of runway coming is quite alarming and the top lesson I would want to learn from your experience would be to demand such information.
I agree this should be a core principle: no access, no involvement. Except that when it has been decided not to give access to them, the company configuration prevented any action against the will of the CEO.
I should have resigned. This would have led to the resignation of the other engineers and the death of the project. I did not want that at first.
It sounded from your original article like you were a director, in the UK I believe directors have personal legal responsibilities to ensure that the company is solvent. Without access to the accounts I would resign as a director even if I stayed as a technical lead or at least would get individual legal advice.
I'm sure that you will much wiser next time, I just want to help you maximise the benefit and was focused on an unambiguous red flag rather than the harder to spot issue of convincing people who shouldn't be trusted (and/or are out of their depth).
"One should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it is not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company."
And yet, in most companies I've worked in, management rarely takes on board any observations from low-level plebs - how could person X even begin to understand the complexity of our org? They're only the call center worker, or IT grunt, or delivery person, or receptionist, or accountant, or...
The prospect of company success/failure has been at the root of most of the issues I've tried to raise with management at places I've worked at. I went from a failed venture of my own to a small company a year later. They were making some of the same operational mistakes I'd made a year earlier. I tried (tactfully) to raise these points, and was rebuffed. 9 months later the company laid off half the employees (guess which half I was in?) and they folded a couple years later, from what I recall.
tldr - many company owners won't take input from lower-level employees. Is there a connection between failure rates and the openness of owners/managers?
I came in to say this. "Oncle Tom" translates to "Uncle Tom" in English, and in the US it has an extremely derogatory meaning towards African Americans. It's essentially a "black man that sold out to the White Man".
The name choice probably wasn't motivated by this, but it's an unlucky choice if the goal was to grow in North America, similar to the Chevy Nova, which in Spanish was equivalent to "No Go".
That coupled with the header graphic on this post (graveyard with what's probably Jesus on a cross but could be misconstrued to be a lynching) gives me all kinds of uncomfortable feelings.
It's from a book Uncle Tom's Cabin[1] by Harriet Beecher Stowe who was staunchly antislavery. In Europe it was very popular, and there was even an U-Bahn station in Berlin called "Onkel Tom's Hütte"[2]. Also, the story of the Chevy Nova in Spanish has been debunked many times[3], but for whatever reason it's a nice story and keeps getting retold. I suppose it's like JFK allegedly proclaiming himself a donut, coincidentally also in Berlin.
I do agree with you though that it's probably not a great choice for a name, if only because people in the US will be hypersensitive and might completely misconstrue the meaning.
The term is very loosely derived from the character from the book. Speaking as an American not given to hypersensitivity on this issue --- my immediate association was with the epithet. If I polled my block, which is majority African American, I'm guessing you'd get the same association from them. If you want to evoke the book in America, you probably use the whole title.
Not that there's anything wrong with the name, at least that I see. I'm just affirming the feedback you got previously. This isn't hypersensitivity; it's simply a cultural difference.
(PS: we chose the name "Matasano" for our software security firm because we gave up on naming and flipped through a list of cool-sounding plant names; turns out, in South America, a "Matasano" is an incompetent doctor.)
The best answer you could have given was, "it's from the name of our favorite Warrant song."
I agree. My intention in using the term "hypersensitive" was to mean "very sensitive" and not to conjure up the connotation that someone should not be sensitive about it.
Given the history of prejudice and intolerance in the US, there absolutely is reason to be sensitive about it.
Or, it could also be that Africans make up ~13% of the US population, and as much as 30-35% of the population in urban America, compared to 3% in France and less than 1% in Germany, and so we're just more familiar with African (American) cultural signifiers.
"As of 2004, French think-tank Institut Montaigne estimated that there were 51 million (85%) white people or European origin, 6 million (10%) North African people, 2 million (3.5%) Black people and 1 million (1.5%) people of Asian origin in Metropolitan France, including all generations of immigrant descendants." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Ethnic_g...]
(emphasis mine)
So Africans make up 13% of the population in France as well (granting that "North African" does not typically conjure the same image as "African American"). It seems odd to deny that America's history doesn't affect its cultural sensitivity toward certain terms (especially the term in question).
You think I'm being more charitable to the US than I am. I'm implying that white people in the US aren't hypersensitive to racial stuff, which makes "Uncle Tom's" associations all the more significant.
Discussions of racism/discrimination are different in Europe than USA. Europe doesn't quite classify people by a small amount of 'races' (like white/black/etc.), instead using local ethnicities, which can get much more complex.
Haha! we named our software Marica for "Management des risques et des contrats d'assurance" (we're a French company).
We have since translated the software in several languages. It appears that marica in spanish means something like queer in English when used against homosexuals, only _more_ derogatory amongst these macho people :-(
While the name "Uncle Tom" comes from the book, the character of Uncle Tom from ~1865 onwards was portrayed almost exclusively in minstrel show retellings of the novel. Minstrel show's didn't quite... capture the anti-slavery sentiments of the book [1].
The novel's Uncle Tom was resistant to the harsher institutions of slavery, sometimes standing in vocal opposition to his masters. The minstrel show Uncle Tom was almost exclusively played by white men in black face, going for cheap laughs by exaggerating the perceived mannerisms of American blacks. Essentially, the novel was radical, progressive and extremely popular. In the process of turning it into a minstrel show, everything radical and progressive was stripped out and replaced with cheap, comfortable laughs for an audience with a concept of how black people are "supposed" to act.
And that's how people who have just read Uncle Tom's Cabin don't get why Uncle Tom is now an epithet for people perceived to be subservient, or cooperating with their oppressors.
One of my earliest memories from childhood is of my uncle, Tom, picking me up and strapping me in a carseat. (Considering carseat usage habits in the late 1970s I would have been quite young.) I still thought of the derogatory sense first, when I saw that phrase.
Well, "Oncle" translates as "Uncle" and Thomas is my first name. It is a French pun I chose 10 years ago; and I definitely not meant to promote slavery or whatsoever. I am more a humanist kind of person.
Sadly at the time I missed the point it could eventually be pejorative in North America (and probably elsewhere). Especially as the book is about getting access to freedom through hard work. A beautiful outcome.
"Oncle Tom" sounds friendly and familiar in French. You could read it as "Bro Tom", a guy you can speak and what with easily.
The header picture is a picture of mine depicting a french fisherman graveyard located in Iceland. While the company was heading to its own graveyard, I was visiting one. This is how to read it.
> https://www.flickr.com/photos/the-jedi/8468239532/
I bet on people intelligence rather than their ignorance. I will eventually have to scale my explanations only if I remain for a too long time on the first page of HN ;-)
Actually this is the very first time I hear a comment about being nicknamed "Uncle Tom". So far in Europe it did not even started a single spark of debate.
If I appear to become a fashionable talent in North America I might consider changing the username to avoid controversy. At that stage I understand it can offend people.
Now is a bit prematured in my opinion.
Thanks for raising the issue, I would have not figured that on my own :-)
Well, thanks for all of responses especially from oncletom. I of course know the book but I was curious about the thought process in choosing the name. I didn't want to assume the worst.
Unfortunately it won't play well with Americans despite your honest intentions. I would find it hard to introduce you to a contact if you used that domain for email.
It sounds like a combination of two rather common startup mistakes: Not making something people want (enough), and spending raised money too fast. Side note: I think the font size is way to big on this page.
Yep that was not the point I wanted to express (what did the company do). I shallowly explained it as well: we hardly described our own product, making it difficult to read from a market perspective.
As a sentence: Web opinions miner and network of influences analyser.
As an example: national market study on insurances based on expressed opinions on the Web, collected in two days, classified and weighted on various criteria relative to the business requesting the study.
Classic example of not understanding the customer. It's selling analysis to marketing departments don't have the time, budget, or expertise to act on this kind of broad analysis.
The tl;dr: is pretty great, but could be genericized:
One should not ignore {{blank}} and issues of a company because it is not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company.
While there aren't enough resources for founders to continually second guess each other, and duplicate efforts, it's everyone's job to ensure the company succeeds.
It's really hard for a young startup to turn down big potential customers, so offering the first taste for free is reasonable, but it's equally important to then quickly discontinue the free trial and leave that customer wanting more.
>>We had 2 marketing officers, 2 business developers, 2 strategy analysts, 1 researcher contractor and 4 developers when operating at full speed.
...with just 500,000 euros in the bank from the capital raise. A good rule of thumb is for raise to allow for 18 mos runway given the burn rate, approximately.
Disclaimer: I work as a teacher and have done management committee work in the UK voluntary sector; charities housing coops &c. Pretty tight regulation.
Isn't having monthly management accounts (cash at bank, income, expenditure, liabilites) sort of basic? Am I being naive?
We agree this should be the case. And eventually bank account reports should be available to anyone in the company as long as the details do not create a possible business threat.
On the other hand, I requested the account details but never got access to them. What do you do when you insist and get nothing? At some point you stop asking.
Considering the structure we had in the company, I am not sure there were legal obligations for the company to deliver the accountancy reports. If the CFO and CEO do not want to share the information… I never found a legal way to oblige them to do so. The CEO owned 52% of the company. Aka `root` access to the machine.
Maybe I am wrong on that part, feel free to add anything I have missed (I do not pretend to know everything, I just wish I would have know all that sooner).
"The tension between us (the cofounders) eventually arose and grew. I paid less attention to ours conflicts because I felt it was useless to waste energy."
I took 'cofounder' to mean an ownership stake. Therefore at least as regards my limited experience, a seat on 'board' and therefore access to management accounts.
Were you an employee? (I'm the one volunteering to proof read the blog post, so its best if we are clear).
- a holding where the cofounders owned shares as of 52, 30, 12 and 6 percent. This company had no business activity and no employee. I owned 6 percent of its 100K capital;
- a startup which was 100% owned by the holding, sharing the same CEO. I was employee and paid by this company (well, "paid"…).
I had a vote decision in the holding, not the startup.
And for some reason I had a reason not to work anymore for the startup (including being fired when we think about it), I would have to sell my shares. If you want to evict someone, this is a great system.
Also, the 12% shares were held by the spouse/partner of the CEO, creating a 50/50 balance which let all the power in his hands, whatever the scenario is.
That is a reason why fighting was useless. And making a viable platform was more a chance for us to get funded, to have an external observer who could eventually rectify the power balance.
when i was very young - 20 years old - i was a part of similar situation once. I hope i learned form my mistakes :) The main lesson is that you're just an employee with 6% of [easily claw-back-able] shares, nothing more. Whereis you sound like you felt like you were something more than that. You didn't even had the power to initiate audit check of paperwork and financial info - minimum power of a "minor" stakeholder.
And this even without getting into having CEO girlfriend in the mix. Man, the time-proven standard practice to not have GF/relatives/etc... in the chain of command of their BF/relative/etc.. exists for the reason.
I guess everyone in this industry goes through a company like this.sooner or later. I once had this CEO, who was gifted with speech.Looking back in shame, i cannot believe how trustful I and all the other were, the alarmsigns were there all along still we couldn't or didn't want to see it. Anyway I found some got friends in this time,still doing projects with some of them. I just lost 8 month of my time,so I guess it is ok, since it gave me some experience. Anyway nowadays I check first before jumping in with full force.
So they spent money foolishly, hired too much, and assumed that the gravity of business expenses didn't matter? That sounds like most failed businesses I've seen or heard.
If the basic economics of a business don't work, it will fail eventually. You have to make more money than you spend. If you can't do that you don't have a business, you have a very expensive and time consuming hobby.
Being french and living in the US, I have a question: Do you feel like the french system (hard to hire/fire, etc) helped in that failure ?
And do you feel like if you had started outside of Europe, you could have raised 10x what you did and maybe found a what to become sustainable ? (even if you say that you don't need money)
Interesting question, as it is a regular debate with the US/FR startup ecosystem.
Hiring is longer than harder: I already knew and contacted directly some of the engineers I wanted to hire. I also used GitHub and requested candidates to apply through a Pull Request (https://github.com/Dijiwan/Jobs).
I am not based in the US, and if I had to hire people there, I do not have enough step back to judge if I could have successfully operated the same way I did.
Most of all, the engineers hiring process was rather 1) an individual trust, 2) a cultural fit (we share the same values) than a "I want the most expensive guy on Earth". I value the individuality of people equally to their skills.
I think this is harder to achieve in a more money-driven environment.
Not being located in Paris but rather in a chilled out city like Bordeaux created an emphasis on the "we want to work and enjoy a good work/life balance". Working on the grass, at the coffee or a nap on the river bank while being able to have a 100% JavaScript codebase when it is your favourite language, this has no money equivalence ;-)
We had more problems with other roles, but I assume it is because we were not clear enough on the expectations and for the reasons explained in the blog post.
Hiring is a lot of paperwork. Firing is a lot of paperwork.
Jobs are sacralised in France and this is normal from an historical point of view: people fought for that. A lifetime full time job was the Nirvana of the Industrial Revolution.
Hiring someone should be a huge responsibility is most businesses: you not only deal with money but with individual's life. So you need to make sure you generate enough revenues to hire someone. It is an ethical debate, and cultural. I do respect individuals, whatever role they have in the company, and I want them to be able to be happy at doing it, even if it is not their dream job.
What was stupid on the business plan is the "hirings objective". They preferred us to hire 8 average engineers rather than 4 excellent ones. At a bootstrapping stage, I bet on reliability and efficiency. It is easier to scale conversations with 4 people rather than with 8.
What I think is wrong in the french public investment is they care too much about job figures and not enough about the company sustainability. Whereas I think in the US, investors care too much about the money and probably not enough about people (this is how I perceive it through the Internet lens, so certainly there is a bias in my opinion).
CEO are still perceived as bank robbers and slave masters. We like national companies to succeed but we hate so much people earning money. Maybe because there is an unfair wages balance between "high value" profiles and other people.
I wish it could be easier to be trained at creating companies, to be promoted and to be educated at creating a successful business. For this, I think US are way better than us. To market and to define a product as well, the US are far better than us.
We did not more money: we needed to make more money. We might have needed more money in the US, simply to scale with the salaries expectations (and to provide benefits, which are provided by the government here in France through the tax payer system; it linearise the cost over the entire country rather than creating an auction system for equal benefits coverage).
The failure we had was human: wrong persons at the wrong place making wrong decisions (including myself, except I think I did my leading job well; the cofounder one has been my weakness).
The failure we had was a product design: we had a super powerful tool and we did not know how to sell it, and we had the wrong persons to sell it.
We were pretty lucky (and probably worth it) to get that much funding. It took us one year (a year you have to fund on your own because you need to pay your bills meanwhile) to get it anyway. And investors have been fooled by some of the founders as we did.
So no, I do not believe the french system helped: we had access to free legal support.
The only lie we discovered is a continuing contract in France does not protect that much when your employer is not able to pay you. In that case, you are prisoner of a system rather than protected by it. This is wrong.
I do not know if it provides all the details you expected to have, so feel free to question me more about that :-)
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