This story makes me really sad because not only do I know one of the Tapulous employees, but also Tapulous really showed a lot of promise with twinkle and tap tap revenge.
I personally can't wait to see what Mike and the employees at Tapulous close to him are going to do next..the rest of the company not so much. I didn't really like some of them when I met them at WWDC.
"Lee says he was brought on as an ex-Delicious Monster employee, and was planning to create the type of full featured and well designed app that Delicious is associated with. Conversely, he says that CEO Bart Decrem is trying to steer the company’s apps into the same vein as Slide or RockYou, with a large number of flashy and fun apps that aren’t particularly useful."
That's ironic, as much as I love Delicious Library I would have described Delicious Monster as a company that creates a small number (one, to be exact) of flashy and fun apps that aren’t particularly useful.
if there are any companies that have a CEO that was brought in from the outside not actually kill the company
Here's another example:
Big U.S. automaker going down the tank fast. This company hires former president from rival automaker, who was fired by the rival's chairman. Big U.S. automaker comes back from the brink of bankruptcy to be a market leader.
Ahh. The original criteria of "if there are any companies..." which I replied to is much broader than "young company takes large investment..."
As far as the second condition, I'd agree that pushing a venture backed CEO is usually a recipe for failure. Once the company matures, well our thread hear shows that is a different story.
"Big, established, but failing company hires outsider CEO to turn company around" seems to be a different pattern (and one with a better track record - Lou Gerstner at IBM also comes to mind) compared to "young company takes large investment, has outsider CEO installed as adult supervision by investors", which pattern seems to often lead to trouble.
Google comes to mind as a company that's well known for beating the curse of the investor-installed CEO; they did so by having the founders carefully vet the potential outsiders. Unfortunately this takes time so if you are running out of runway and need that investment in order to reach V2_min, you perhaps don't have that luxury.
Oh man, this sucks. I've been reading Mike's blog for a while now. He seems like a super smart and insightful guy, and his passion and attention to detail really rubs off in his writing.
I personally can't wait to see what Mike and the employees at Tapulous close to him are going to do next..the rest of the company not so much. I didn't really like some of them when I met them at WWDC.