'...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization...'
"An acquisition is always a failure" — Pando, 2013
"An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders."
Well, the tone of the Pando CEO’s sale announcement was almost of mourning.
While Lacy didn’t go so far as to talk about failure she does recognize, with regret, that she is no longer able to do her job effectively. I found the frankness very emotionally touching.
And what's wrong with failing? What's wrong with trying for years and years and then deciding not to pour your life into something? (It's not like she did it for three months and then decided to bail.)
I can't imagine selling was easy, but the wise course is not always easy.
(Note, you don't explicitly say that failing is bad in your comment, but that's the tone I took from it. If that wasn't what was intended, I proactively apologize.)
"As a founder, I have a personal goal that's just as important and just as core to our culture: I do not want to sell this company. [....] So let me put it this way: Selling is not success to me. If I wind up selling, I've failed in some way. We didn't get as big as we should, we didn't execute on the opportunity or I didn't hire the right team and got too burned out."
Sarah Lacy made it quite clear in the post that her heart was not in the game anymore, and that she had become as cynical as other bygone journalists. She isn't selling for money, she's selling because she doesn't want to do the work anymore. You can call that failure, but I would call it resignation.
Even more ironic is that he had to revise that book just after its publication because in the 1st edition he totally missed what phenomenon the Internet was going to become.
He completely failed to understand, or even mention, the internet as it was then developing. Before we got shanghaied by adtech, and "social".
His small vision of the information highway was a world full of Encarta CDs and Micrsoft Windows services that you'd subscribe to.
The main memory of the book though is "oh boy, what a boring read". Some achievement at a time when computing was firmly in its most exciting period, before it became a commodity.
On slightly thinner ice, Microsoft was at the height of "embracing, extending and extinguishing" the browser and internet at the time of the book. They failed in good part from completely misunderstanding, presumably at management level, their target. I'm sure many individual MS engineers understood well enough.
The era when you could put an activeX component on the desktop, or embed it into a screen saver, and some network services like ftp wouldn't be distinguished from just opening an explorer window. A world of (mostly teased but not delivered) Windows services you'd subscribe to like a series of cable channels, and when sites still backed either Netscape or IE with little "made for..." icons. Which stopped because MS thought they were "finished" with IE 6.
[Edit: IE 6 was rather later and understood, but balkanised the internet. IE 1 and 2 were interesting. Sort-of compatible but available via an MS view of the world - as an extra cost option in the Windows Plus! pack for Win 95. It was only Win 95 after some service pack that included IE in base. I'm not sure when downloads started, but initially I don't think you could]
All that does is the widen the same doomed closed system.
The way out is in. It's mutuality and ecology.
There are infinite resources available if we scale down our economies. Billionaires who live gigawatt lives need to be seen as the wastrels they are. We need to learn to respect the ant and the mouse.
An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, that challenges conventional historical chronology by being "too advanced" for the level of civilization that existed at the time, or showing "human presence" before humans were known to exist.
Not as out of place as popular media would have you believe. Ancient civilizations had analog computers, automatons, steam engines etc the Romans were responsible for destroying most of it, they were only interested in weapons tech, set us back at least two thousand years.
