Time to step aside.
October 29th, 2005
There are moments in life when you have to draw a line, let the past behind you and take a turn hoping that the new road will take you into the right direction.
When I started on that road, it seemed the right one, I’m still convinced about that the only problem is that we don’t really see the road ahead, we only imagine it, we get many clues, lot’s of feedback but not all of it makes sense, beside that, the road changes direction from time to time, sometimes you notice the change, other times you don’t.
Five years ago I started a company with a couple o friends of mine, it was one of our dream, we understood technology very well and we saw how a well-designed and well-applied one can be meaningful to anybody willing to use it. We started from zero, a typical garage story and we managed to make it the nr. 2 software company in the county, wasn’t an easy ride, neither a free one as we had to work our butt’s off but the excitement was not missing at any given moment.
We’ve been lucky, right at the beginning we’ve got sourceXchange and we managed to win a couple of very exciting projects. I mean how can it be any better than this, write code, open source one and get paid for it. We even had our 5 seconds of fame when NHK, a public television from Japan, came all the way to Romania to make a documentary about us and the magic of the new open source revolution, and ADT Magazine where featuring us as the new way to do things.
But then the bubble came, and we found ourselves with no client, no projects and no products, we turn our eyes to Romania and started, from scratch, again, to build a consulting practice in the idea that at some point we will make the transition to a product based software company. It took us almost a year to manage to get to the point where we covered our own expenses and start to finally be cash positive, and from there it went better and better.
We were still at the point where we had a vision, a great team of extremely talented and passionate people and superb technology and practices to rely on. Unfortunately, somewhere on the road, between the increasing diversity of the projects (finance, production management, content management, customized Linux based dedicated servers and appliances, and lately automation) and the continuously growing number of clients, we’ve lost our vision.
A growing company it is like a child, it requires special kind of attention and knowledge, requires management. It is simply not enough to have the people, the clients and the technology, they all are indispensable ingredients, but without management will only produce a more or less successful projects and a more or less satisfied clients.
The role of the management, beside looking for clients is to make sure that they are more satisfied rather than less and that the projects finishes under a specific time frame so that the projects remain profitable. It is also the management’s role to make sure the company has a vision and that vision is pursued according to a strategy.
Aldo we successfully managed to get clients, choose and write technology, finish the projects and help the client successfully implement it, we failed miserably in fulfilling the rest of the mandatory tasks on the managements list. This was not an unknown problem to us, we knew about it and we tried, obviously not hard enough, to put it from theory to practice, but somehow we never managed to get there.
I have my own share of guilt, as a CTO and even more as a co-founder I should have done more to make it happen. I have my own excuses, being a small team and eating only what we produce I had to actively do my share of coding and carry my own projects which somehow always happen to be to many and leave me no time to do even what was part of my function, project management not to dream about getting really involved into the company management. Somehow all those projects seemed near a finish, after which I could have concentrated some of my attention to project and product management, together with helping achieve a vision, but again somehow after every completion came more projects, each one more urgent and important putting that line further and further.
But deep inside I know that these excuses do not hold, instead of working 14 hours a day I could have worked 18, instead of silently accepting more personal projects I could have said stop, and instead of letting everyone down, I could have stepped up and take the responsibility for being the CEO and making sure that management happens.
Unfortunately after 5 hard years and many, many worked hours I don’t have the energy for another extra 4 hours, I have a problem saying stop, and I’m too young to exchange my passion, software development for company management.
Gradually I lost my belief that those things that are really important will ever happen, and that prevents me to make my team see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least without being dishonest, which I cannot accept.
Being unable to change them, to make the vision happen, and to perform my basic duties as a team leader and more importantly to believe, I saw no other way than to resign on 18 November 2005 and leave the company in the hope that maybe somebody who can do all those tings will pick up the challenge, or at least the actual management will finally see the situation as I see it and do something about it, except to ignore it.
The company is still full of potential, as always have been, thankfully to some amazingly talented and dedicated people who built with sheer passion amazing pieces of technologies, to some extremely smart clients who trusted our knowledge and creativity to solve their problems, and not at last to a great bunch of corporate partners who believed that together we can server better our clients. To all of you whom might fill betrayed by my departure I appeal to accept my apologies, it was a decision of conscience, a very tough and painful one but maybe in this way things have a chance to change.
