I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?"
"Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?"
"Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"
"Oh great"
So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11.
Should have paid more attention to that damned website.
I worked at marchFirst back in the day. Even had the chance to meet Bob Bernard. That experience shaped how I run the company I co-founded 3 years ago. M1's number one problem was a culture of spending money without any thought of a return. Which was probably really odd for folks on the Whitman Hart side of the merger. It really was a merger of two opposite cultures.
This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss).
marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock
price reached $52. By the time the company filed for
bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001).
I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead.
In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate.
It's no longer useful. The SEC used to require an EX-27 schedule in SGML with useful data. They discontinued that around 2001. Years later, they started requiring that data in XBRL format, which is more detailed. You could do this today with XBRL tools, which are available.
Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated.
One of my favorite sites back in the day! I remember checking it daily to make sure my employer wasn't there. Fun times! We seem to be missing that edge--that deep cynicism and unashamed negativity--this time around.
This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time.
Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.
No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn.
But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur.
Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.
Isn't the quote "This time... will be different!!!"
And then when the corn kills him again and:
"That's not different at all now, is it Steve?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI
We are all Steve and this time will not be different.
Uh, I wasn't familiar with that little tidbit of culture...
Rather, it was a reference to the fact that in the last few years, any time someone suggests that we might be in another tech bubble, there's always someone waiting to point out how "this time it's different", because now the web is mature and all the stupid startups are not really as stupid as they seem (not like in the first dot-com bubble).
Actually, it's a bit of a double entendre in that sense -- even the first dot-com bubble was rife with statements about how everything is different now, and we're in a "new economy" and all those "old economy" concepts like revenue and profit are totally obsolete. Plus ça change...
Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!
I would like it and wouldn't mind hosting it, but yeah FuckedCompany does have a better ring to it than the other names I see here. That might be nostalgia though.
Glassdoor can be (and is) easily tainted by submitting fake positive reviews. They have a policy of not letting employers remove negative reviews, but that doesn't stop the company from flooding with "it's a fast-paced work environment, so some people clearly can't handle the heat in the kitchen" style "positive reviews" to reframe the legitimate negative ones.
So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.
You have to appropriately weight the reviews. Some types of reviews tend to be heavy on negative, some positive. Glassdoor is the type of site you have to focus more on the negative reviews than the positive.
I've seen this happen. Some of my colleagues had written bad reviews for a company I had worked at. My employer found out eventually. They ended up flooding glassdoor with fake positive reviews, down to changing tone and typing style between posts to throw people off.
I love glassdoor. Sometime you see high level management on there giving frank plus and minus assessments of the business, often critical of higher levels. It's not just disgruntled departures but often current employees.
