However, in this particular case I think the CEO was running this as a pump and dump for nearly a decade, claiming to be fully funded and having no board (because he claimed it was self funded), and giving himself massive raises year over year.
So a private equity firm bought something hollow. I have some guesses about it. Probably a friend of his, probably got it cheap, and is about to gut whatever is left now that the guy who did own it got out with what he could. Why would PE buy it otherwise? There’s no goodwill or name to cash in on like what’s being done with Native Instruments.
Agreed. I’ve seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn’t just ‘fire’ everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.
So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS – especially as there have been notes that the intrepid ‘board’, on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that’s what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on – they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn’t normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings – so they’d all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren’t getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is ‘always’ at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn’t come out of nowhere at that level.
All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they’d thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone – and it sounds like these were all ‘local’ developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn’t support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don’t know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.
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Fucking sons of a bitches, a pox on private equity firms, I hope they all get leprosy.
I mean, yeah.
However, in this particular case I think the CEO was running this as a pump and dump for nearly a decade, claiming to be fully funded and having no board (because he claimed it was self funded), and giving himself massive raises year over year.
So a private equity firm bought something hollow. I have some guesses about it. Probably a friend of his, probably got it cheap, and is about to gut whatever is left now that the guy who did own it got out with what he could. Why would PE buy it otherwise? There’s no goodwill or name to cash in on like what’s being done with Native Instruments.
Agreed. I’ve seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn’t just ‘fire’ everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.
So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS – especially as there have been notes that the intrepid ‘board’, on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that’s what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on – they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn’t normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings – so they’d all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren’t getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is ‘always’ at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn’t come out of nowhere at that level.
All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they’d thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone – and it sounds like these were all ‘local’ developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn’t support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don’t know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.
I hope they all get untreated ciphilis.
Fun fact! Syphilis was known as the Great Pox, in contrast to Small Pox, which is why smallpox is called that!
A pox on them, both great and small.
Now I know!