The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.
Another example: current CEO of Cerebras, is an SEC felon from a prior company (for cooking the books), and now he's CEO of a public company.
"failed up" is currently defined as founding a company that goes public and being its CEO. I'd love to know what success is.
They've pivoted many times over the years trying to make "wafer scale" work in a variety of use cases, and they still haven't gotten it right.
By the way, the CTO is dumping stock left and right and the stock is down nearly 5% today alone...
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/insider-cerebras-s...
> how has cerebras not gotten their chip right?
It doesn't scale, and won't ever be profitable. They pivoted to inference, which has the unfortunate (for them) side effect of also requiring a boat load of memory. This is why they just partnered with AMD to offload onto their chips.
> I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing
Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
(I'd ask some LLM to research it but the people who would be doubtful it's false significantly overlap with the people who distrust LLMs, so I'll just leave this as a random guess and nothing more.)
You have some startup, the founder is either young or doesn't want to do the CEO stuff. Things kind of eek along until the founder either steps aside or is removed by the board because a) it's time for a "grown-up" CEO; b) the CEO needs real sales experience; c) the founder overpromised and under-delivered; d) board/VC politics make it helpful to install a buddy as CEO; e) etc.
Then the CEO clock starts, typically they have 18 months to get lucky and hit their metrics. They do a lot of glad-handing. They hire "their team" of sales/marketing/etc people. They spend A LOT of money. And I mean A LOT. They talk about OKRs or SMRTs and KPIs. Out of nowhere a small army of project managers show up and try to tell you how to do your job and why you can't just talk to the <thing X> team directly but have to go through them for "efficiency" and "visibility."
In 3-6 months, senior engineering and R&D staff starts to leave. Whatever culture you had slips away. HR has "culture" meetings to "find the right company culture."
Sales/product can't sell and points the finger at R&D, maybe even for the right reasons. You OKR/KPI harder, but it doesn't matter because nothing addresses whatever the underlying problem is. Multiple senior people have pointed loudly to the problem and are ignored; they're often not managers so it's unclear if they were even heard.
At some point there are one or more rounds of layoffs; sometimes these are announced, sometimes it's just a gradual attrition.
Eventually the CEO clock runs out. They don't get lucky. Nothing they did helped, and some of it hurt. They collect their $1M severance, get to keep their stock, get 9-12 months of health insurance, and move on. In a year or two you hear about them joining a new company as CEO.
In the meantime, you've either moved on or have a new CEO with a new 18-month clock.
just need to spin the departure as being decisive and able to make tough decisions and he'll be back in the ceo seat in no time. especially if muse does well.
I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.
This is a great example of saying how things should work, which is almost the exact opposite of how they actually work.
From looking at the historical prices, it was down from $450 to $410 from a month ago, but still quite a bit from $235 six months ago, which is not anything close to what I'd consider "collapsed". Of course, he might have expected to continue going down, but that's going to be hard to measure in the short term given that announcements like this tend to affect the price directly in the short term (so far down to $338 today, close to double the loss of the entire previous month, although it seems far too soon to draw any conclusions).
Not that I think I'm saying anything that has any sort of bias, but it's probably reasonable in case anyone happens to read this and be suspicious: I did work at MongoDB for around five years (but haven't worked there for nearly as long), and from that stint I did have a sizable amount of shares, although as of last year I no longer hold any (for reasons completely unrelated to any personal opinions of the company; I had procrastinated way too much on making any sort of decision about how much to hold onto and for how long, so when my wife and I were buying a house, I decided it was time to just liquidate it and put it towards that instead).
I haven't had this experience I have found a lot of people who burnt the damn house down get hired in a company for a similar role in a few months especially CEOs and executives. Including large companies, I had someone I know in a c suite role who burnt a few other companies to join competitors now working in Tesla and a friend who burnt the bridges with supposedly half the SF who is still employed in a similar c-suite role in SF.
I really don't think people care unless you are a nobody sofware developer who tried to do the same perhaps, mostly because I can't prove it.
Not sure how you made that assessment!
52 Week Range: 215.68 - 473.10
Yesterday, it closed at 410.44. Clearly, very far away from collapse. In fact, it made a solid comeback (almost doubled from lows).
Maybe he had enough.
His stocks/options vested/exercised last Friday. He's not forfeiting anything.
It seems he is deeply connected, and probably approaching centimillionaire wealth.
Even if he is burning some bridges, its not going to affect his career at this point.
Edit: I looked at the current interim CEO's profile, not the outgoings, but its almost the same story- he is 55, been on other boards, has experience at director+ level since 1995 listed... this isn't going to hurt his career.
I think they’re missing some internal loop. Only external rewards satisfy them and they maximise for that. Stopping is not an option, because then the rewards stop coming and they have no idea how to exist when that happens.
Or there's something else scandalous happening and he wants to halt a bad look ASAP? I don't get why he or Meta couldn't have waited a couple weeks otherwise.
You must be new to the corporate world or incredibly naive.
Mosseri is basically the same age as Zuck, and Zuck still seems extremely hands on.
Check back in 10 years to see how things are going, maybe its Wang or a currently unknown 20 something.
I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.
But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.
Is it?
Scandals require consequence. He's getting a new job at Meta. It'll take lawsuits to suss all of this out and those take years.
Worth noting: CJ wasn't just the CEO, he was also board member and president.
This is what happens when you don't have effective corporate governance.