Natalie Sidner

How to Destroy a Tech Startup in 3 Easy Steps Natalie Sidner

Insane ambition. Insane deadlines. Insane leadership. A software death march. A true story. It began with an ingenious idea: to use the software techniques known as Natural Language Processing to allow people to interact with databases by writing ordinary English sentences. This was a multi-billion dollar idea that could have transformed the way people gathered and used information. However, the venture had inexperienced leadership. They burned through their $1.3 million seed money. As their resources dwindled, their confidence transformed into doubt, which was aggravated by edicts from the Board Of Directors ordering sudden changes that effectively threw away weeks' worth of work. Working from the company emails and Slack messages, the authors re-create the actual day to day battles that gave rise to the early optimism, and also show the moment when euphoria transformed into panic. Here then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about tendencies that everyone joining a startup should be on guard against.