Sunday, May 24, 2009

Death by 'MBA culture'

The following is from Keith Rabois in his essay, "How Facebook, MySpace and YouTube Killed eBay" at the Web site TechSpace:

"...at one point right after it bought PayPal, eBay had the leading actors of most of this entertainment revolution sitting in its offices. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube fame, Peter Thiel (Facebook), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Max Levchin (Slide), David Sacks (Geni and Yammer), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, board member of Zynga) and others, myself included, were all too alienated by eBay’s bureaucratic and political MBA culture. So we decided to create our own fun elsewhere instead."

Tom Field and I ran into that "bureaucratic and political MBA culture" and started our magazine Valley Business FRONT in response. We have watched that culture devastate our primary competitor in this publishing market, rendering it a laughable shell of its former proud self. The pub in question lost yet another sales person last week, one who walked out shaking her head at the stumblebum, heavy-handed, insecure, inexperienced, arrogant management. Good people disappearing as the ship goes down because of those Captain Blighs. It's a joy to be a fly on the wall for this.

Even without this personal link, the essay is smart, informative and quite revealing.


No comments:

Post a Comment