agreeable personality. They picked people who were pretty junior, who didn’t
have much experience with real-world customer projects, and they basically
killed the company. Once you have a product that nobody wants, it doesn’t
matter how good your management team is.
So 4 or 5 months after our shareholder meeting, they came in and fired the
CEO—demoted him to COO or something. They put in one of their own partners
as the CEO. He hung out there for a while. They put in more money, I
think another $10 million, and he gradually...

growth.
Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you
found you were better at?
Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The
VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel
more than what you said.
Managing programmers is tough. That’s one reason I don’t miss IT, because
programmers are very unlikable people. They’re not pleasant to manage. In aviation,
for example, people who greatly overestimate their level of skill are all
dead. You...

want to pay their bill, and they were upset with us. There was a meeting about
this, and I was with the new CEO and one of the MBA guys that worked for
him, talking about this customer. It was out in the Los Angeles office. The managers
said, “This customer’s upset with us. How do we get him to pay us more
money?” I said, “How much do they pay us?” They said, “$700,000.” I said, “Is
their site launched?” They said, “No.” I said, “How much did we tell the customer
that...

wasn’t going to launch. They hadn’t understood the tradeoffs. A couple weeks
later they launched.
Livingston:Was there anything that you think people misunderstood about the
demise of ArsDigita?
Greenspun: I haven’t written that much. I’d like to write some reusable lessons.
We have some uniquely clever things that we did, like making websites
that were multilingual. Just engineering stuff. I just haven’t had the time or the
energy for some reason.
People focus a lot on the bust-up phase. It upsets me that they remember
the wrong things like, “This Greenspun...