Okay, as one who lived through pretty much all of Loudcloud/Opsware, I can tell you that Ben pretty much nailed every single event of that 1999 - 2003 arc (when I left Opsware) pretty flawlessly.<p>What he glosses over a little (but not totally) was how fucking traumatic those layoffs were back in 2002. I recall him stating (and our VP of HR not believing he was saying it) at the completion of the cuts that there would be "no more layoffs while he was CEO". He just never wanted to go through anything like that again, so he cut as deep as he thought was need to avoid future rounds - one big round up front.<p>I don't know if it's relevant, but he also doesn't mention that a ton of employees were thinking of $20-$30 stock that then reverse split and went out at $6 (or $3 pre-reverse). The IPO was totally anti-climatic. We didn't even have a party.<p>When we had our "Opsware Founders Meeting" in Santa Cruz there was a very big deal made of the fact that we could go a _long_ time without getting a single new customer, and still not run out of cash (though, he always refused to answer my question of what Opsware would do if EDS canceled their contract with us, or just didn't pay us. :-).<p>Not running out of cash was a very, very big deal. Also, Opsware was a pretty big byzantine pieces of enterprise software (at the time, mostly written is Python, which was pretty forward looking for 1999-2000 - Ray Soursa had to convince people that no, perl would not be our platform), with all sorts of knobs and dials, and, they were still a public company, which meant there was a pretty good sized staffing overhead that your typical "startup" wouldn't see. It's not clear to me that there was much fat left on the bone by the time he was done chopping.<p>All in all though - the story is definitely worth reading over a few times - everything there happened pretty much exactly as he's calling it. Gem of an article, and Ben is easily one of the best technical company CEOs out there so that adds even more value to the read.