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Patrick destroyed a successful company, and will be receiving millions of dollars on exit. His current replacement was an executive at the failed Quibi service.

Nothing in tech will improve until there are actual consequences for people like this. Serial failures just hop from job to job. ruining products and lives along the way.

6 comments

I replied the same thing in another thread, but Patrick was at Sonos for 12 years, and 14 years at RIM before that, so he doesn't really fit the MO of a "bouncer."

I think his point is that he can likely find a job elsewhere even after this.

That he receive a golden parachute is cringe worthy.

Tom Conrad didn’t have anything to do with Quibi’s failure. The app was actually pretty cool. That was a bad business model which a good product couldn’t fix.

He’s a product guy going back to being CTO at Pandora. He seems like a pretty good interim choice all things considered.

It had an unusually high minimum version number, which I calculated at the time meant that 10% of US phones and tablets in use at the time couldn't run it. When you've already limited your maximum possible user base to only that market, 10% makes big difference.

Apparently he has a tattoo of Sonos headphones on his left forearm.

It's not just the people at the top. It's totally normal and acceptable to release software that doesn't work. I can count the number of times that I couldn't complete a transaction in a physical store on one hand, but I regularly can't accomplish what I want on a web page or mobile interface because the software straight-up doesn't work.

This relevant XKCD is right on point: https://xkcd.com/2030/

The problem may have come from the top down, but now it's endemic to the entire industry, and in any large company no one, at any level, can make anything stable and reliable without completely failing at whatever metrics the company is using.

I think a large part of that is management-centric software design philosophies that push constant output and metrics over good software.

For example, Agile's four values could be read in a way that supports good software development, but in practice they are effectively asking for: prioritizing appearance and metrics, releases that are undocumented proofs of concept, sales-department directed capabilities, and feature creep.

It's so counter to the development of working software that the only explanation is that one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto had stated: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

You blame Agile?

Agile is just an example. Management strategies in general are based on gaming metrics that benefit management and sales departments, at the cost of customers and developers.

Tom who is stepping in is an awesome executive. He was OG Pandora and Snap before Quibi and was on the Sonos board. He's a true product person. I'm sure he was enjoying semi-retirement and see him dropping in as CEO is a huge upgrade. :-)

We don't really structure business law to allow for the appropriate amount of risk. The whole point of incorporation is to limit liability and shift what remains off of individuals at the company.

If you try to change this, you'll hear screeching about how there's just too much risk and the "job creators" will just take their capital and ideas to more business-friendly legal climes.

What is the "appropriate amount of risk"? Please be specific. How do you quantify that? Should politicians decide that rather than shareholders, Board members, and management?

If I could answer that question to everyone's satisfaction, I'm not some rando on the internet.

But the justification for a lot of the incentives we give capital is "they shoulder all of the risk", and when your risk is walking away with a severance package that is often many multiples of the median lifetime earnings of the American male, you aren't really dealing with any real risk.

Eh, even keeping the mechanism of limited-liability-corporations around, some would say boards aren't representing shareholders' interests effectively.

It's one thing for shareholders to say if under the CEO's leadership, the company's value rises by 100 million dollars, they'll give him a $10 million bonus. I can see how a board could approve that - it's a lot of money, but it's linked to performance.

But should they also say that if the company's value falls by 100 million dollars, and they decide to fire the CEO, they'll give him a $2 million bonus? How is it in shareholders' interests to reward bad performance?

One reason that CEOs get good severance packages is to entice them to leave other successful companies. If they are doing well at those other companies, are well liked by the board, and can reasonably expect to make a lot of money, why should they leave that safe, lucrative situation to come to your company, where there's a higher risk of failure or of falling out with the board? Enter the severance package. It guarantees the incoming execs a minimum payout that's large enough to entice them to give up what they'd expect to safely earn by staying where they are.

That's a great explanation for signing bonuses.

Doesn't do much to explain severance packages though?

Unless the board wants to give a signing bonus, but the amount is so egregious the shareholders would riot, so they need to do it by stealth.

Yes, if you're an executive being lured away from your current position, both signing bonuses and severance packages will serve as insurance against your new position not working out. But, if you're on the board that's trying to lure an executive away, you should prefer severance packages to offer this insurance because you don't have to pay out until the relationship falls apart, and if you've chosen your new executive well, the relationship won't fall apart.

Severance packages are usually negotiated from a position of power. You want me? Great, I'd like a 2M golden parachute.

If everyone they interview agrees to play the same game (and they do), it becomes a "necessity to attract top talent".

Boards will sometimes write a severance package into a CEO's contract with an eye towards a possible future sale. When the company is acquired, the CEO will most likely lose their job. The Board thus wants to ensure that the CEO doesn't have a financial incentive to block a sale. A good severance package can increase shareholder value. (This is just a comment about severance packages in general, I have no idea what happened at Sonos.)

Even more problematic are the invisible hordes of risk averse middle managers.