this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
431 points (98.6% liked)

Gaming

2534 readers
164 users here now

The Lemmy.zip Gaming Community

For news, discussions and memes!


Community Rules

This community follows the Lemmy.zip Instance rules, with the inclusion of the following rule:

You can see Lemmy.zip's rules by going to our Code of Conduct.

What to Expect in Our Code of Conduct:


If you enjoy reading legal stuff, you can check it all out at legal.lemmy.zip.


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Plays out in small tech companies too, albeit in a slightly different way.

Got that carrot dangled in front of me at a past job. Company was past start-up phase; self-supporting and doing ok, but not outrageously well. Promises of riches should the company be "noticed" and bought for an outrageous amount.

Of course none of that accounted for the CEO (founder and 85% shareholder) being an absolute crazy person, who would change the development roadmap into making a vastly different product than the one we (the techies) believed in, TURN DOWN THE OUTRAGEOUS SUM BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HE COULD GET A BETTER OFFER, basically run the company into the ground, and wind up selling it for a pittance (which would have made the employees' share a pittance of a pittance).

I mean most of us had already left by that point, but finding out around 4 years after that he'd turned down about $150M and wound up selling out for $3M, that stung a little.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Reminds me of a place I worked for in the 90s. We were the premiere catalog of contemporary radio drama in the country. It was niche, but doing okay. One day, this company comes up to us and says that they're starting a satellite radio network and if we work on a commission basis, the company will make a lot of money. Only about five people worked there and we all begged and pleaded with the owner to take the offer, but he was nuts and kept saying things like, "there's GOT to be a catch!" So he ended up passing.

Yes, that was Sirius, which became XM.

Fucking moron.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Sounds familiar to me too.