How did Meta leadership destroy Lacework
A good case study that we should discuss here.
tell us more?
Metamates come in and later lose 98% of company’s valuation. Anybody who knows Facebook would know this would happen. Meta leadership doesn’t care about the customer and reliability is not valued (especially when Jay Parikh was head of infra) - horrible combination for an enterprise startup!
Hired infra experts with no knowledge of infra outside of Meta. No knowledge of public clouds, containers, even Bazel. The leadership decided to build new systems from the ground up instead of using existing technology. Eventually most of the leadership went back to Meta leaving jobs half done and no one to lead the work. Then the Meta ICs quit.
the ship was bad before metamates joined.
But rewriting history is so much more fun esp if it averts blame/shifts accountability away from you
The entire system architecture was bad and could never scale. Meta engineering was supposed to fix this with their superior talents. Instead they made it run cheaper and faster but it's still bad.
Focused on infrastructure projects that were very time consuming and did not translate to value from the time that was put in. Didn’t have a cross collaborative team that took feedback from different orgs (customer success / sales / etc) to get an understanding for what customers wanted to build. Often times it was “this is our vision”. Many things like tech debt weren’t the fault of the meta people
Lack of domain knowledge and lack of experience building enterprise products.
This. The arrogance that building facebook/ instagram translates to successfully building enterprise cloud security product. Lots of cycles wasted trying to navigate their politics. It was the worst of the seattle meta, msft and aws culture.
They also got rid of QA which meant that they kept shipping broken shit to customers. Never learnt from their fuckups. They were not customer focused
Pushed out the original engineering leadership for Jay's friends, brought in a bunch of meta engineers who were great at infra optimization / pet projects but no domain or product knowledge. Paid those people more than the existing engineers while simultaneously downleveling them. Told the metamates them they were better than the current engineers. At the same time they introduced PSC so people were only working for promos, not product. At that time I head a load of people on both sides say they weren't going to do actually important work because it wasn't in their PACE By the time eng recovered the shithousery happening in sales meant it was too late
Blame goes everywhere. CFO more interested in earning interest on money raised instead of quality headcount. Thinking about runway instead of being bold. No effort in customer retention. No pricing strategy on how to upsell and creat e SKUs. No customer engagement team - only sign a deal and speak with the customer again a few months before renewal. Poor tech leadership. Best they did is “ring a gong” event. Introduced PSC at a startup. Stupid tech leads prototyping that goes nowhere. Would need infinite compute and db to run. Waste everyone’s time by talking about 3 year old vulnerabilities. Hired ex-Google, ex-meta, ex-twitter leads that were terrible and didn’t know how to build product. PMs creating useless spreadsheets. Clueless CISO. Delivered nothing. Marketing campaigns that don’t make sense - instead of targeting enterprise workloads, the target audience is LinkedIn self declared leaders. Eg female CISO in various companies - not sure how this translates to revenue. Terrible product, scans that do not finish. Agents that use up all customer CPU/memory. UI full of useless widgets. Pages don’t load. Unactionable alerts.
It wasn't Metamates or at least not just them. They hired that fuckwad Andy Byron as CRO and President. Dude is a cancer. Let's check out his history. CRO, President of Lacework. Valued at $8.5B while he's there and now going to sell for $100-200M. CRO of Cybereason. Valued at about $3.2B peak, took a round last year down 90%. CRO and President of Fuze. $765M valuation in like 2017, acquired for $250M. I feel bad for anyone at Astronomer because those morons clearly did no diligence when they made him CEO.
Someone should look into what he did with his stock at all these companies when their valuations were the most inflated. Lacework had some secondary offerings…
I know for a fact he sold massive amounts private market and secondary. Dude made tens of millions destroying companies.
They laid off everyone who was not from Facebook.