My hottest of hot takes: the only people who should run companies that make things are people who deeply give a fuck about those things.

[jameshowell@fediscience.org]

@Daojoan I have got some bad news about higher education in the United States

[nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@Daojoan I sometimes wish I could make a living just making sammiches.

[m104@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan the other people (don’t have to name them) first convince these people that they don’t know how to do business properly, then start making the product bad, then fight the customer, then ask for a bailout

[kevinflynn@c.im]

@Daojoan
A Bobby Kotick quote comes to mind

[uair@autistics.life]

@Daojoan

Hell, just requiring them to know about the industry would be a huge step up. The old expression about a boss who wants 9 women to have a baby in 1 month comes to mind.

[nobodyelse47263@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan also extend this to politics.

[jrdepriest@infosec.exchange]

@Daojoan

Star Trek has been flarging this up for years. We get good Trek in spite of who's controlling it, not because of them.

Abrams and Kurtzman don't even like Star Trek while Seth McFarland went out and made his own loving homage show because he loves Trek so much. Paramount hates Trek.

[deirdrebeth@mas.to]

@nuintari @Daojoan

There was a tiny sandwich shop just off a ridiculously expensive street, in a ridiculously expensive neighborhood, that sold really good sammiches for like $5 a pop. In the street 2 eggs and toast would run you $27.
The location was too small for anything else. No seating, just a counter and room for maybe 4 people to wait if they were cozy, and I think they just made it work for as little as they could and still make a living. I loved that shop. Definitely run for the joy.

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan heresy.

[evanwolf@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan seems less measurable than "the only people who should run companies that make money are people who deeply give a fuck about money. Only people who love money and love making money should run companies that make money." I keep thinking of the corruption of idealistic young Andreesen to Oligarch Andreesen.

[aburka@hachyderm.io]

@Daojoan the problem is that when you run the company you don't have any time to enjoy cheeseburgers/games/etc anymore, so those people don't want to do it

[plantagolabs@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan Agreed. CEO used to be a position that was obtained after 30 years carrier in the company, starting at the bottom. Now one starts CEO by being a lawyer with an MBA and go from company to company, hoping the next company is bigger. I think companies were better run back then.

[clickymcticker@hachyderm.io]

@aburka @Daojoan Also you’ve lived the product so deeply during development that you can never view it the same way as someone else who sees it for the first time. There’s a reason some actors never watch their own films.

Being a video editor is psychological torture depending on your relationship to the media. All of the magic is ruined when you watched every scene a hundred times. Bonus: You thought you liked that song? Now you’ve heard it a hundred times in this one scene and it is permanently linked to that moment. The song could come on the radio for the first time in fifteen years and it will trigger that one scene in your brain. You can’t forget it.

[psychoticscroodlebum@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan Indeed. My sons' preschool was taken over by a franchise, and the new owner was very nice. But, when I asked her what her vision for the children was, she said, "Ummm ... I don't have one". We were sacrificing to fork out for private pre schooling, so no vision was not acceptable.

[borisschapira@framapiaf.org]

@Daojoan "fortunately", a lot of people deeply give a fuck about hurting other people.

[gimulnautti@mastodon.green]

@Daojoan Yes, would be great. And those kind of people do usually start the companies up.

But when the people who care do get successful, the greedy start showing up.

The greedy are excellent liars: They chameleon themselves as if they care. But along the way, the greedy start hiring more of themselves.

There are a lot of people who make careers to suck up to the greedy, a lot more than you think!

Finally, the greedy push the originals out. This happens to every company.

[davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan

This.

If you love the products a company makes, it's not hard to pinpoint the moment the company went from the We Love Games people running things, to the We Love Money And Nothing Else people ruining things.

[1337@techhub.social]

@Daojoan It's a shame worker cooperatives aren't more common. Many successful tech companies even have/had a flat structure that kind of mirrors worker coops; except they have parasites sucking up the profits.

[davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social]

@Uair @Daojoan

Know about the industry?

I used to work at an international airport.

The following is a conversation a work colleague told me about.

Very Senior Manager At The Airport: "Where does Qatar Airlines fly from?'

Colleague: "Qatar."

Manager: "Yes, that's their name. But what country do they fly from?"

Colleague: "Qatar."

Manager: "Yes, but what country do they fly from?"

Colleague: "Qatar."

Manager: "Yes, I know the airline's name, but what country do they fly from?"

[metacosm@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan the problem (or is it really one if you take an anti-capitalistic view?) is that the Venn diagram of « people who love the thing » and « people who understand economics well enough and are willing to apply the concepts to run a company successfully » is mostly two disconnected circles…
Alternatively, if you love the thing you’re making, stay small and never go public or take on investments from people who don’t love the thing.