For those wanting/needing context:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793170" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793170</a>
Here's the context, from the author:<p>"Simultaneously, we were forced to deal with a board member who was beyond counterproductive. After we bought him out fully in 2019, I sent this feedback email detailing the ways in which he had disrupted our board and company. Dealing with this issue was one of the loneliest times I faced as a CEO. To be clear, this email is unlike anything I’ve sent in my life, and I’ve thought long and hard about the decision to share it. I’m not doing so to disparage the individual in question; the only objective is to help others who might find themselves in a similar situation. (Nothing has been removed, including typos, from the email except for names.)"<p><a href="https://ryancaldbeck.medium.com/transitions-fa7ce4af435" rel="nofollow">https://ryancaldbeck.medium.com/transitions-fa7ce4af435</a>
The sender of this email seems to be upset because they let the receiver of this email walk all over them for so long. Publicly releasing this email makes both sides seem so unprofessional. The real lesson here is that this CEO’s lack of healthy boundaries prevented them from saying no—over and over again—to making obviously bad choices. I feel for this person’s employees.
<i>I regret that we went thruogh the "diligence" process in just a few weeks</i><p>Does anyone work in M&A? What in your experience is a sufficient timetable for diligence and discovery? I ask working for a company that "grows by acquisition", and being in a middle management role I find myself often playing clean-up crew to some alarming things that <i>should</i> have been caught during diligence, but am growing increasingly weary being told "we didn't have time".<p>This is no attempt at malingering my duties, but I've lost one staff member already to the burnout from this, and am quite fearful I'm about to lose another. Both have told me "it's not you, you've been a great manager" yet both have lamented feeling like their jobs have turned into playing the 'janitor' role for messy acquisitions saying "you did what you could"<p>My own complaints up the food-chain have been returned with shrugs by a director who seems equally powerless in a process that is burning people out--and I'm considering looking for the door at the end of the year from it.
Releasing this as-is seems like a bad idea. He's likely addressing a former board member by name, as well as their firm. Couldn't you just look at all of the names of board members and their firms, compute the metrics of those names with the typeface being used, and then figure out exactly who he's talking about?
The email is funny but this company raises some red flags for me. Firstly I couldn’t figure out what CircleUp actually does as a “tech startup” from reading their website.<p>On further reading they used to do something (a marketplace to connect investors and consumer companies needing funding) but they pivoted into being a plain old investment company (ie what the founders used to do themselves).<p>They make some very dubious claims about using machine learning, what huge dataset are they pulling from when the pool of companies is tiny and their marketplace doesn’t exist anymore?<p>How is a VC meant to get VC returns from a company that is itself simply raising money and investing it in early stage companies.<p>This feels like clever self marketing (tech founder vs financiers!) when really it’s a pissing match between VCs