Yahoo's Tim Brady (founding Chief Product Officer):
When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.
When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.
<https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/tim-brady-interview/>
(I'd noted this on my subreddit: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4qpd8z/tim_bra...>. I'd completely forgotten that this was from Ycombinator originally>.)