Ontologies have become much more mainstream over the past year or so. Case in point: Microsoft's new Fabric IQ product, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/overview. I don't know how good this product is, but there's a LOT of interest in the space.
Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."
I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant.
I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.
I guess I read the tone of his blog post a little differently than you did. I basically interpreted it as boiling down to "disney sucks" and while he did admit to making some mistakes, IMO he didn't take nearly enough personal responsibility for the situation ending up with what we have today. I can empathize because it obviously is a disappointing result, but I interpreted the blog post as basically a complaint against his ex-employer (a "how could they have done this!" type of thing), not as a mature reflection that recognizes that he himself effectively caused this result. If he had said, "I shouldn't have been a sellout to ANY big corp," I'd feel differently.
I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.
No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.
(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.
I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?
Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things:
Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.
I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.
Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.
A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.
Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.
> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that.
If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.
I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)
Eh, maybe. I feel like once you're a sellout, the situation is out of your hands. As a founder, you have to accept that, or you shouldn't sell the business in the first place. Or you could structure some very strict buyout terms, I suppose.
Companies pay obscene amounts of money all the time for things don't end up using. Google does it all the time. Was Disney acting a fool here? Absolutely. But is it within their rights to do so? Also yes. (I'm actually kinda surprised they didn't sunset it sooner, since I don't think it was making much money.)
I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.
You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence -- he agreed to sell to a big corp, and this is the kind of thing big corps do. I get that it's unfortunate, but this is the kind of thing you have to anticipate when you sell a business.
The problem I have with these headphones (at least V1) is that the ear cups don't tilt horizontally. Maybe my ears are more angled backwards that most people's ears, but with theses headphones, the headband part sits really far back on my head. This creates a lot of pressure on only the back edge of headband.
Until they make the ear cups tilt horizontally, these will be a no-go for me. My ancient 10+ year old Bose QCs 35s can pivot and are a million times more comfortable.
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