Seething with rage, he attacked my work, to hide how urgently he needed my help
Abusive leadership is almost always self-destructive. Successful businesses rely on honest feedback from everyone on the team, and that requires a leadership that is respectful and willing to listen
This is the longest story I will attempt to tell on this Substack. I was working at a startup, but the leadership was dishonest and abusive, so I left the startup, and once I left, the whole place fell apart.
It might seem ironic to start a Substack devoted to Respectful Leadership by first recounting a story about abusive leadership, but our goal here is to illustrate how self-destructive abusive leadership can be. Some business leaders spend every moment worrying about their competition, but the truth is that more companies die of suicide than homicide: if you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot then you are already doing better than most entrepreneurs. So, as an example of what to avoid, what follows is a true story where abusive leadership destroyed an otherwise promising tech startup. I wrote a whole book about this story; what follows is merely the condensed version.
Everything I learned when I built my own company (from 2002 to 2008) has convinced me that an early-stage startup must be a transparent learning organization or it is dead. But to achieve that kind of transparency, the top leadership needs to be respectful: the team members have to know they can be honest with you and you won’t respond with anger.
In 2015 I was hired as the senior software developer at a startup whose aim was to let salespeople talk to Salesforce, by using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. This was in New York City. We were in the Varick Street startup incubator that is run by NYU. Like other the other startups at the incubator, we had a small team of just 4 people.
When I was hired I had this impression: John was a founder and he was the CEO. He was 22 years old and he’d just raised $1.3 million. His co-founders were two guys named Dennis and Griffin, our CTO and CMO (marketing).
Right from the start, I had the sense that the leadership was lying to me, but I did not know why. This was my first encounter with Dennis:
Tuesday, May 5th, 2015
John liked me, so he asked me to talk to his co-founder, Dennis, who was the CTO. What followed was a tad bizarre.
We spoke via video. Dennis was 21 and in his last week of college.
"Congratulations!" I remarked. "You’re almost to the finish line!"
"Thanks, man!" He laughed. "I can't believe it's almost over. Time really flies."
Dennis was future-oriented, ready to move on to the next chapter of his life. Which, as I was about to learn, did not include the startup he’d been building. Rather, he would be going to Google. I was puzzled about this but didn’t harp on the issue.
After the initial chit-chat, he cleared his throat and commenced the interview portion of our video conference. "Uh, okay." He seemed confused about what to say. "John wanted me to ask you some questions."
"Fire away," I said."Okay, look, uh . . ." he started, then paused. "How about this: You’re in line at a barbershop. There are x number of barbers who all cut hair at different speeds, and there are y number of people ahead of you in line. Can you write the code to figure out how long you have to wait before you get a haircut?"
“You want me to write some code or just talk it through?”
“You can just talk it through.”
An easy puzzle, I walked him through my answer.
“Yeah, great, great,” he said. “Cool. You seem really smart. I’ll tell John.”
“Uh…” I was baffled. Was that the whole job interview? “Do you want to ask me anything else?”
“Sorry man, I need to pack my whole apartment today,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
What the hell was this? A CTO building the tech team for a startup doesn’t talk like this, doesn’t act like this, and doesn’t hire in such a careless manner.
So what was really happening? And why couldn’t the leadership simply be honest about what was going on?
Dennis went out to the west coast and did an internship with Google. I never interacted with him again. I never interacted with Griffin at all. I don’t believe Dennis was the real CTO of the company. Apparently someone, somewhere, had decided that we didn’t need a CTO. Later on, I was told that I needed to take responsibility for the problems on the tech team. Yet I was never formally offered a leadership position. Why?
From May till the end of July we worked on a simple version of the app, and then suddenly the leadership decided on a more ambitious project. I called this the Big Pivot, as we threw away 3 months of work and started on something new. Our initial app had been traditional, with buttons that a person could click on, but after the Big Pivot we tried to build something that would rely purely on NLP. This took us in the direction of science-fiction: there were some big issues that we needed to solved, but we lacked the resources to solve them.
Who was the leadership? Again, someone lied to us. When I was hired I was supposed to believe that John and Dennis were the leadership, but over time it became clear that John was being managed by someone on the Board Of Directors, a fellow named Milburn. Every day I would arrive at the office and John would be on the phone with Milburn. So what was the role of the Board, and what was Milburn’s role on the Board?
Our team:
John, our CEO.
Me, an experience software developer.
Kwan, who lived and worked in Washington DC, an experienced iPhone app developer. All of his work was excellent: his professionalism was exemplary, his code was flawless.
Sital, a very junior level data analyst who had taken a class on Machine Learning, so he knew the basics. He’d been hired to be our NLP expert, a role he could not live up to. I spent much of the summer teaching him the basics of software development.
Arthur: a true NLP expert, a consultant we paid $400 an hour to educate us. In theory, Sital would be able to build the NLP technology we needed with some advice from Arthur. If Sital had been ambitious then this could have been an amazing opportunity for him to become a real NLP expert, but his main interest was weight lifting: he was bulking up fast. He spent 2 hours a day at the gym, and he spent hours at work watching videos on YouTube about weight lifting. After the first few weeks we stopped talking to Arthur.
Greg: after the Big Pivot I realized we would need to build a Finite State Machine to manage the state of the conversation that salespeople would have with our software. We were stretched thin and unable to build this ourselves, so I fought to get money to hire an outside consultant, and we eventually brought in Greg, who did excellent work for us.
As we got into the autumn, the top leadership seemed to fall into a panic about money. I was confused about this. If we really had $1.3 million then we should still have been awash with cash. Assume we were all being paid $150k a year, that’s $12.5 per month, that means the 4 of us would cost $50k a month, so over 6 months we had spent, at most, $300k. I wanted to hire a much larger team but I was told we didn’t have the money. Someone was lying, but I couldn’t figure out who, and I couldn’t figure out why.
Sometimes investors offer money in tranches, with each tranche tied to some milestone. So it is possible that John had been offered $1.3 million, but only if he could get the app out the door and find a customer to give us money. That might explain why some days John seemed to be having a full blown panic attack, but other days he seemed euphoric and over-confident.
At the start of September I made an estimate that, if we hired Greg full time, then we could get the first version of our app out the door in three months, and we could have a full featured app by the spring of 2016. This estimate was greeted with absolute disgust. I’m not sure why. Even three months was considered a crime. Apparently they needed money right away, urgently. But that was an impossible fantasy, there was no way we could move that fast.
Kwan and I could not figure out what the truth was, but we knew that Sital was slowing us down. If the startup needed to move at a faster pace, then the obvious thing to do was to fire Sital and replace him by bringing in Gregory on a full-time basis.
Tuesday, September 8th, 2015
I had partly rescued the bad code that Sital had written in August, and now I gave it back to him, hoping he could finish it. He promptly broke it again. We soon realized that we had a lot of work still to do getting the apps to talk to each other, and we could not rely on Sital for anything. Hwan was worried about the situation and asked for a telephone conference so that he and I could discuss it openly with John.
Hwan and I both now made the case, as strongly as possible, that Sital was a danger to the company. United, we stated that we would lose faith in the future of the company if John continued to support Sital. I recounted the numerous incidents that had occurred over the last four months which gave us reason to fire Sital. Hwan expressed the fear that Celelot was running out of money, or would run out of money if we had nothing to sell. John jumped in and reassured him: Celelot had plenty of money and we should not worry about the financial condition of the company. Additionally, he said that they were about to close another round of funding, so they'd be all set for a year.
"You can never be sure about funding," I countered.
"We can be sure," said John. "Trust me. We have this money. It's already locked in."
It didn’t make sense: supposedly we had plenty of money but we desperately needed more money before we could hire the team that could build the real vision of Celelot? Some part of this had to be a blatant lie, but I didn't pursue that angle. Instead, I pointed out that we had missed every deadline so far because of delays which traced back to Sital, and we would continue to miss deadlines so long as we depended on him.
"Okay," John finally agreed. "You guys are right. He's dragging us down. We gave him plenty of second chances, but he hasn't improved. He's bad for the company."
"So we’ll fire him?" I asked.
"Yes, for sure," John assured us. "How about we fire him in three weeks?"
"Why three weeks?" I asked.
"We just need to close this current round of funding, and then we will fire him. And we’ll have the money to get someone really good."
"But you can't be sure about the money," I repeated.
"In this case, we can be sure about the money." He seemed entirely confident on this subject.
"If that's true, then that's a reasonable plan," I agreed. "We fire him in three weeks and hire someone better."
"That is good news!" said Hwan.
"Yeah, it's my fault," said John. "I let this drag on for too long. I should have acted sooner."
"What's important is what we do next!" Hwan urged us to stay focused on our goals.
"Yes," I said. "Can we get someone as good as Arthur?"
"Maybe we can get Arthur himself," said John. "We will have the money, once this next round closes. I'll reach out to him."
"We might bring in Arthur full time?" I was astounded again, but finally in a good way. "That would be truly fantastic!"
"Yes," John affirmed. "I'll talk to him. As soon as this next round closes, we’ll move to build a quality team."
Hwan was professional but was sure to give John an indication of how happy he was about the decision. "This really changes my perception of where we’re going."
"Well, it's my fault," John repeated. "I should’ve acted sooner."
We all congratulated each other on the new direction of the company, and then we hung up.
And for a few days, I actually felt something that resembled hope regarding the future of Celelot.
Whatever investment they were promised, it never materialized. Three weeks passed but there was no mention of any new money.
Despite all of the lies and distractions, the truth of our situation slowly became apparent: Milburn was a sales guy, who had once been successful, but who wasn’t doing so well now. He’d lost some old gig, but then he’d come up with the idea of this startup, and he’d somehow gotten some investors to put up some money to get the thing going. And in some sense, John had never been the real CEO. In fact, John had done an internship with Milburn a year earlier, in 2014. So John was no more than an assistant.
But that meant the team had been working for months without ever having a conversation with the real CEO, a situation that was basically insane. If Milburn was the guy who made all of the real decisions, then I should have been having a one-on-one conversation with him at least every week, if not more often. Or, even better, if John lacked real decision making power, then I should be invited to speak to the whole Board Of Directors, to ensure maximum transparency.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2015
I woke up at 9 AM and checked my email. John had written me:
need to test t now. Somthing needs to be upladed I don't care what. N now
John was lucky that the project itself was exciting. Working on something so original and new was tremendous fun. I’m fairly sure that Hwan and Gregory felt something similar to what I did. Our loyalty was to the project; we had no loyalty to John. In my experience, it is rare to get the chance to work on anything as interesting as this. The pressure John applied would have inspired a rebellion if the project itself had been less intriguing.
I wrote back to explain that we were still working on the code. He wrote back with exactly the same message, typos and all, so I assume he simply copy-and-pasted it:
need to test t now. Somthing needs to be upladed I don't care what. N now
Okay, fine. I pushed all of the newest code to the server. At this point, we had a dozen apps. Some of these were minor and did background administrative stuff. Some helped Jenkins and other server software. We currently had six apps that were crucial: the iPhone app, the API app, the NLP app, the Salesforce app, the Salesforce login app, and the Conversation FSM.
None of these apps was perfect, but four out of the six basically worked. The Salesforce app and the Conversation FSM still needed some more attention.
Apparently John had tried to send a message from his iPhone and had gotten no response from the server. He was pissed.
John
not workkking
lkrubner
That is correct.
I got to the office at 11 AM. John was out at some meetings, as usual. Sital was there, and he looked worried. He asked me if he could do anything to help. I said no. Then he asked what would happen if we didn't get the system working soon. I told him that I didn't know.
John came in around noon. He ostentatiously sent another test message from his iPhone, even though there had been no changes since his earlier test. He again told me that the system was not working and I again told him he was correct. He was furious about this, but he remained silent. He sat in his chair and stared at us. An hour later he tried to send yet another message from his iPhone.
This was childish. I still had not pushed any changes to the server, so we all knew that it wouldn't work. But he did it anyway, and then he told us that the system still wasn't working. I told him yet again that he was correct.
I had never before worked in such a tense environment.
John sat there for another hour doing almost nothing. He looked miserable. Sital looked worried, and he stayed focused on writing unit tests that would ensure the stability of his system. To his credit, Sital was becoming a real computer programmer. At the rate he was going, it was possible that by the summer of 2017 he would be everything we’d needed in the summer of 2015.
Milburn called John. I heard John say to the phone, "It isn’t working." I couldn’t hear exactly what Milburn was saying, but it was clear he was screaming. John winced at the rage and went back to the conference room. I wondered what would happen when he came out, whether he would actually have something to say to us or just sit there and stare some more.
I decided I wanted dinner. I also decided I would work from home for the rest of the evening. I could not tolerate any more of John staring at me.
I gathered my computer and bag and headed out. As I passed the door of the conference room where John was in a video chat with Milburn, I heard Milburn’s voice.
"You made a mess, John, you made a mess. Again. You always screw things up, always. I give you a second chance and you screw it up. How many times have you screwed up this project? You screwed it up good now. Listen, I tried to help you, because your dad is my best friend, but look at what you've done. Look at what you've done. Do you know how this makes me feel? Do you understand how betrayed I feel? Do you remember that time when you were nine years old and we went camping, and you wanted to go out on the rocks in the river, and me and your dad said no, they're slippery, don't go out there, you'll get hurt. But you just had to do it. You had to do it. You wouldn't listen to us. You went out there on the rocks and you got hurt and then we had to take you to the hospital and our whole vacation was ruined. We could have had a nice time but you ruined it for everyone. And that's what you're doing now, you're ruining it for everyone."
There were several moments where John started to say something, but in every case Milburn talked over him. I wasn't sure who the guilty party was. Milburn wanted John to think that the current situation was John's fault, but was it? One of the fundamental problems was the chaos caused by the Big Pivot of July 28th. As far as I could tell, that had been Milburn's decision, but apparently Milburn did not want to take responsibility for his mistakes. He was trying to put a massive guilt trip on John instead, and it seemed that John was not fighting back.
I walked home. The whole conversation was a shock. Milburn had known John his whole life? Milburn was best friend’s with John’s father? That put the whole situation in a new light.
Why come up with a fake origin story about Dennis and Griffin? It took me many weeks to figure that part out, but eventually I decided it was for the investors. After all, if you're an angel investor, which of these sounds more appealing:
1.) Some tired, 60-year-old salesman has a part-time project involving sales software and he's put his 22-year-old assistant in charge of it. Please invest $1.3 million.
2.) Three brilliant and ambitious college guys came up with a plan to disrupt the multi-billion dollar CRM industry with the hottest NLP technologies now available. Please invest $1.3 million.
Where would you put your money?
Over the next 2 weeks we made major progress getting the whole system to work together. We were close to being able to send multiple messages from an iPhone, to our servers, collecting all required information, and then sending all of it to Salesforce. But we were not moving fast enough to keep Milburn happy, so at the end of October he stepped in and took over as the person who was actually running the company. This was bad in some ways, but at least now we had an honest picture about who the real decision maker was. Six months of lies were giving way to a certain kind of transparency. If Milburn had been a good leader, then this might have been a positive development. Sadly, he seemed to feel that the only way to motivate us was to use threats and insults. The situation became needlessly hostile.
Over the years I’ve had many different kinds of bosses, both good and bad. I’ve had some bosses who sometimes lost their temper. But I’ve never faced a situation as extreme as what I faced with Milburn. He seemed to feel that abusive leadership was good leadership, but in the end his actions destroyed the whole startup.
Monday, November 2nd, 2015
I woke up and got ready for work. Still at my apartment, I checked my work email. I saw that Milburn had sent me a short message:
Why did you send those emails yesterday? Please call me as soon as you get to the office.
Was he going to try to censor those emails? This was the exact opposite of the reaction I had been hoping for.
In an attempt to give him one last chance to think about what he was doing, I replied:
I send email all the time, everyday, week after week. Do we now have a policy that says I cannot communicate with my co-workers? That is unusual.
I went to the office. I settled in and checked GitHub, and I pulled all the latest code that anyone had committed. A few minutes later, Hwan showed up. I was excited to see him. I had not seen him since October 16th, and he had not been to New York since June. We started to talk about what we should accomplish while he was in New York.
Then John came over. He was on the phone with Milburn. I heard John say, "Yes, he’s here. I’ll tell him to call you."
I found a private corner of the incubator and gave Milburn a call. The following is how our dialogue went down.
Me: Good morning, Milburn. What can I do for you?
He skipped salutations altogether.
Milburn: I asked you to call me. Why didn’t you call me?
He sounded sad and angry simultaneously.
Me: I just got to work, and Hwan got here from D.C. We simply stopped for a chat.
Milburn: I asked you to call me. It’s a simple request. Just a phone call.
A long pause.
Me: Yes, sir, but I just got to work, and Hwan got here at the same time.
Milburn: It's a simple request! Basic politeness. I wrote you an email, I made a request, and you ignored the request. I had to call John, and John had to pressure you to pick up the phone.
Me: I was aware that we would be speaking soon. We have a conference call coming up, don't we?
Milburn: I made a very simple request, and you deliberately decided to ignore it. Basic human decency should have been enough for you to honor that request, but I guess you don't believe in basic human decency. And you decided not to call.
He paused. I said nothing. A wave of sadness hit me. If his instincts were to censor me, then the startup was doomed, and I had just wasted six months of my life. But I couldn’t think of what I could say to make him see how serious the moment was. Nor did it sound like he wanted to have an authentic discussion about the problems at Celelot. Rather, he seemed focused on thwarting the conversation that I had hoped those emails would spark.
After a long silence, he continued.
Milburn: You decided not to call. That is not nice. It’s rude, it’s disrespectful, and I’m hurt. As a human being, as someone with feelings, I am hurt, and I would like an apology.
He sounded like he was going to cry. This note of self-pity was surprising to me.
My friends and I have sometimes discussed the right-wing television personality Glenn Beck and his tendency to cry on Fox News television. Is Beck truly overwhelmed with emotion as frequently as it seems, or is it all just an act? The best explanation I had ever heard, from a friend of mine who is a professional actress, was that a great actor fully experiences the emotions they're portraying — so it’s possible that Beck is playing a character in one sense yet still genuinely feeling his emotional raptures in another. And I think something similar must be true of Milburn. On the one hand, it seems naive to think that he really felt such strong emotions over my failure to call him, but on the other hand, his emoting seemed entirely sincere.
Me: I received an email from you stating that you would like to talk, but we have a meeting scheduled at 1 PM and—
Milburn: I told you to call me!
Me: —I knew we were going to talk. As a team. We need to have a team talk.
Milburn: I told you to call me! Don’t send a bullshit email! Pick up the phone if I tell you to pick up the phone!
The innocent often believe that salespeople aim to be nice all the time, but this is based on encounters with retail-level salespeople who have to work with customers whom they don't know. And when the type of retail is known for narrow profits, then the salespeople don't have time to get to know the customers — because the game is all about volume, not closing a few large deals.
But if a product has fat profits, or the industry is all about a few large deals, then the best salespeople get to know their customers and use all personal information as a weapon. If you go to buy lipstick, the salespeople will often be nice, because they don't have much leverage over you. But if you go back to the same store repeatedly, a good salesperson will learn your weaknesses. Maybe you are worried about your thinning hair. Maybe you are worried about your weight. Maybe you have lines around your eyes. Every weakness is a potential sale.
And if the obvious forms of manipulation fail to work, then a great salesperson will get nasty. Okay, reject their advice, don't take care of yourself. That's fine. Let yourself go, look like a wreck. Why care that your children will be embarrassed when their friends see you? Why care that your husband will lust after other women? You’ll be a terrible mother and partner, but hey, I guess it's okay to be selfish, right?
Every industry has certain euphemisms for the least savory aspects of its business. In sales, there is the secretly ugly phrase, "goal oriented." That sounds pleasant, doesn't it? If I point at a woman and I say, "That entrepreneur is goal oriented," then you probably think I am complimenting her. But if I point at her and say, "That entrepreneur is a lying, manipulative, soulless psychopath who brutally exploits labor from the 11-year-olds she employs in her sweatshops in Indonesia," then you probably think I am insulting her, unless you are a Libertarian. And yet both statements mean roughly the same thing: that she is someone who is willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure the success of her business.
When I read about Milburn online, I'd seen testimonials from his colleagues in which he was often described as a goal-oriented salesperson. That probably meant that he was a master of manipulating other people’s emotions. He knew all the tricks: praise, shame, laughter, anger, promises, guilt, threats.
Whether his use of these tools was conscious or unconscious is, of course, unascertainable. But it doesn’t matter much. A lifetime as a sales professional left him with an arsenal of psychological ploys that had become second nature to him.
In this current situation, he surely knew that once a person apologizes, the apology sets a precedent for the conversation, and the person who apologizes tends to continue to apologize. But that much is Psychology 101, and I was aware of the trap. For this reason, I avoided apologizing.
Me: I was confused by the email that you sent. It sounded like you wanted to talk about the fact that I sent emails to my—
Milburn: You are wasting the time of your co-workers, when they are trying to stay focused on getting the next release out. Does that interest you at all? Do you want us to get the next release out?
Shame and guilt. There he was, skillfully wielding those tools from his sales-tactics tool belt.
Me: Milburn, I have been working very long hours to try to get the next release out.
Milburn: The time you spent writing those emails is time you could have spent debugging your software. But I guess that doesn’t interest you, does it?
Essentially, he was saying that I was no longer allowed to communicate with my co-workers regarding any issue except for a small set of issues that he would arbitrarily define. This wouldn't make sense if he wanted me to maximize my effectiveness as an experienced programmer, but it would make a lot of sense if he simply wanted me to stop putting so many of my opinions into written form. Assuming it was his idea, and his alone, to use our "brilliantly creative data scientist of incredible genius" as a trap for unwary angel investors, then my emails would be quite a revelation to the rest of the Board and to any disgruntled investors. I always had to wonder about this angle. Did Milburn believe what he was saying, or were his threats meant to cover up some larger scam that he was running?
A line such as, "But I guess that doesn’t interest you, does it?" is never meant in a literal sense; it is always thrown out there to show that the speaker has the power to do so. The previous Tuesday he had praised me for working long hours and shamed Hwan for not working as late as I did, yet now he wanted to suggest that I was lazy and didn’t want to work.
Milburn: Who am I to you, right now?
Me: You are Milburn Jennings, a member of the Celelot Board of Directors.
Milburn: Yes, that’s right, but who else am I?
For the life of me, I could not imagine what he wanted me to say. Did he want to hear something stupid like, "We are teammates!" or "You are my friend!"? At a stretch, I could imagine he wanted to hear something like, "You are an investor in Celelot," but I did not actually know if he was an investor or just a Board member, so I couldn’t say that.
Me: Who else are you?
Milburn: Yes, who am I to you?
Me: Uh, I’m not sure what you are looking for.
Milburn: I AM THE LEADER OF THE TECH TEAM!
Me (unable to hide my surprise): Oh?
Milburn: And do you know why I am the leader of the tech team?
I said nothing.
Milburn: Do you know why I am the leader of the tech team?
I said nothing.
Milburn: BECAUSE YOU FAILED!!!
In court, lawyers typically follow the rule, "Do not ask any question unless you already know the answer." I knew to adopt that rule in an adversarial situation such as this. That meant censoring the first few responses which came into my head. I wanted to ask, "How do you define failure?" but that would have been like handing him a sledgehammer and inviting him to take his best shot. So I filtered out any questions and instead stuck to firm counter-assertions.
Me: This project is on time.
Milburn: You could’ve done something great. You could’ve come in here and been a real leader. You could’ve shown the world what you were made of. But you decided to do nothing. You decided you’d rather sit around and complain. You didn’t lead this team. You don’t know how to lead. Admit it. I want to hear you say it. Admit that you failed.
Me: We have built some very impressive technology. This is a service that has to deal—
Milburn: ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT YOU FAILED???
Me: —with massively concurrent real-world communications going between multiple points, from the iPhone to our servers, though our NLP—
Milburn: ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT YOU FAILED???
Me: —engine, sometimes back to the iPhone and other times to Salesforce. And we have built a working demo—
Milburn: ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT YOU FAILED???
Me: —in a reasonably short amount of time, despite significant personnel issues.
Silence. Possibly I had frightened him when I mentioned the personnel issues. I took out my iPhone and I started texting Natalie. I sent her bits of the dialogue that Milburn had said to me. (As I mentioned before, when I finally sat down to write this book, these messages to her were one of my primary sources of documentary information for recreating the dialogues.)
A long moment passed. He was waiting for me to speak and I was waiting for him to speak. Actually, I was waiting for him to hang up so I could go and get some actual work done.
Milburn: You can’t do it, can you?
I stayed silent.
Milburn: You can’t do it, can you?
I stayed silent some more.
Milburn: You can’t admit that you failed. Because that hurts, and you don’t like to feel hurt, do you?
This was a guy who was almost crying a few minutes ago because I didn’t give him a phone call. Or at least, he was almost pretend-crying. Or pretend almost-crying. In any case, this was quite an accusation for him to now throw at me.
Another very long silence followed. He was hoping that I would talk into the silence. That’s the kind of mistake that John always made. I, too, used to make that mistake; I suppose we all do when we are young. It’s an easy trick whereby those who are good at verbal combat can get their opponent to concede: create an awkward silence and then see if the other person feels compelled to say something.
He let out a long sigh.
Milburn: So where are we right now? Where is the software? What more needs to happen?
Me: We are stuck at the point where we call the NLP "model" that Sital has built, so I assume there is some problem in Sital’s code.
A long silence passed.
Milburn: You like to blame others, don’t you? Does that make you feel good, when you blame other people? I’ve heard you blame Sital, I’ve heard you blame Hwan, I’ve heard you blame Gregory, but you know who you never blame? You never blame yourself. I’ve never heard you say one bad thing about yourself. And yet every single time you blame Sital or Hwan or Gregory, in the end, when we find out the real problem, it always turns out to be you. All of our problems go back to you, but you never take responsibility for what you’ve done.
Several things occurred to me at once:
First, I could repeat these words, verbatim, about Milburn himself. Certainly, if the Board of Directors felt we were running late, the root problem was Milburn’s decision to proceed with the Big Pivot back in July.
Second, it would be a mistake to treat any of what he said as rational.
Third, the only accusation I’d ever thrown at Hwan or Gregory was that they were relentlessly talented. Their excellence was noteworthy. My serious criticisms had been confined to Sital's programming and John's management.
Fourth, it would be a mistake to respond as if we were having a good-faith conversation, eagerly trying to discover the real facts of the situation.
Fifth, I had learned a great deal over the previous six months — and if we were having a good-faith conversation, it would be productive to talk about what we could do differently. But this current conversation had become a pure power struggle, so there was no room to talk about any of the interesting ideas that could make Celelot better.
Me: We have added debugging statements to every function in the system, and the code runs until we call Sital’s model. That strongly indicates that there is a problem in that model.
Milburn: Why didn’t you foresee this problem and put in some guards against it?
Me: We have made huge progress making this code more and more stable. We are on track to meet our deadline this week.
Milburn: Can you guarantee that the project will be complete on Friday? Every bug is fixed? We can put this in the hands of a customer on Friday, and you guarantee it?
Me: I don’t want to speak to—
Milburn: IT’S A YES OR NO QUESTION!!!
Me: —how much Hwan or Sital still need to do, or how—
Milburn: IT’S A YES OR NO QUESTION!!!
Me: —many hours Gregory feels he can work this week.
Milburn: IT’S A YES OR NO QUESTION!!!
Me: It is not a yes or no question.
Milburn: IT’S A YES OR NO QUESTION!!!
Me: It is not a yes or no question!
Milburn: WILL YOU MAN UP AND GIVE ME A YES OR NO ANSWER FOR ONCE??!
Me: It is not a yes or no question! I cannot take responsibility for Hwan or Sital or Gregory!
Milburn: THAT’S RIGHT! YOU CAN’T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING!!!!
Me: Why have more than one programmer if I can write all the code myself? Why did you even hire Hwan or Gregory or Sital if you thought I could get this project done by myself?
Milburn: IF YOU ARE LEADER OF THE TECH TEAM THEN YOU TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE TECH TEAM!!!
Me: If I am the leader of the tech team, then why are we ignoring the estimate I gave in August?
Milburn: Oh, I see. I get it. You don’t want to be lead developer any more, is that it? Too much responsibility? Is that it? When the going gets tough, Lawrence goes home. Is that it? Well, I just looked at your LinkedIn profile. Do you know what it says there? IT SAYS YOU ARE LEAD DEVELOPER AT CELELOT!!!!
Me: What about John's responsibilities? If I am the lead developer, then—
Milburn: IT SAYS YOU ARE LEAD DEVELOPER AT CELELOT!!!!
Me: —why can’t I get rid of Sital and why can’t I hire someone better—
Milburn: IT SAYS YOU ARE LEAD DEVELOPER AT CELELOT!!!!
Me: —as a replacement? And why can’t I get Gregory hired full time?
Milburn: ONCE YOU RING THAT BELL YOU CAN’T UNRING IT!! IT SAYS YOU ARE LEAD DEVELOPER AT CELELOT!!!!
I wasn’t even sure what that meant, and it’s possible that Milburn didn’t know either. Milburn was very, very good at this kind of verbal combat, and he clearly learned long ago that he could win a fight like this by getting the advantage and keeping it. And a person doesn’t need to make sense in order to keep the advantage; sometimes it’s enough to simply shout loudly until the other person backs down.
To the extent that he had any kind of rational point, he seemed to imply that because I was the most experienced person on the tech team, I should take on the responsibilities of being CTO. But for the first four months I'd been at Celelot, I was told that Dennis was the CTO. I also recalled that when John had encouraged the rest of the team to pick titles, he said we could pick any title for ourselves besides CTO. If they had wanted me to be CTO, then they would have needed to pay me more. And I would have demanded complete honesty and direct access to the Board of Directors.
Much later, I thought about what he had said: "I just went and looked at your LinkedIn page ..." That is a truly revealing remark. Before I called him, he knew he was going to need some ammunition to use against me, so he had checked my LinkedIn page in the hopes of finding something. He probably also checked out my blog and my other online sites. That said a lot about how he operated. Although he seemed to engage in sudden bouts of rage, he actually planned his attacks carefully (just as any good salesperson carefully plans each sales call). His actions were almost certainly deliberate, even though he tried to create the illusion that his emotions were spontaneous.
And of course, we never talked about the notion that the CEO should take responsibility for anything. Was there, at this moment, an unspoken awareness that John was Milburn’s assistant, and John had been given the title of CEO just for fun because Milburn did not need another credential on his resume? In a startup with just three programmers and one CEO, four people in total, the CEO would normally take some responsibility for the progress of the tech team.
Milburn: No one ever told you September.
Me: Pardon?
Milburn: No one ever told you September.
For the life of me, I could not imagine what he meant.
Me: I’m … I’m honestly not sure what you mean.
Milburn: In your bullshit email. Stable and feature complete. No one ever told you September. No one ever said that to you.
Me: September?
Milburn: Don’t you parse my words! Don’t you dare do that! Don’t try to derail this conversation again!
Milburn truly had a genius for the strategic use of anger. If he sensed the risk of losing control of the conversation, he would indulge in another outburst. His techniques were fundamentally dishonest and manipulative, but that is probably (once again) what made him good at sales. And his tactics were perhaps an effective way to drive a sales team, but I sincerely believed that such tactics were the wrong way to run a software development team. Especially when doing something pioneering, like we were, open and honest communications were extremely important.
(I’ve worked at firms where the sales team was noteworthy for both its success and its friendliness. One does not need to use abusive tactics to have success in sales. Indeed, the sales manager who relies on abuse is typically more interested in aggrandizing their own success, rather than the success of their company.)
And my question was a valid one. Did he mean to say "spring" and he accidentally said "September"? Both words start with "S" and I could imagine him mixing them up because he was angry. In my email, I had written "spring of 2016." This seemed like an important point to be clear on. If he was saying that he had never pressured us to be done during September, and I had imagined the pressure, then that would be a revelation.
Milburn: No one ever told you that! Whatever month you said, no one ever said that to you!
I could imagine why Milburn might be in trouble with the other Board members. Did he really think that because he wrote some Visual Basic code 15 years ago he was competent to estimate an extremely high-level NLP project in 2015? If so, this was perhaps a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is where someone with little knowledge of a subject doesn’t realize how much they don’t know and therefore assumes they are highly competent.
Me: I think the Spring of 2016 is a reasonable estimate for being feature complete and reliable.
Milburn: You will never say that again. Do you hear me? You will never say that again. You have done everything in your power to demoralize this team. You have done everything in your power to distract them from the mission. You have done everything in your power to sabotage this project. I’m sick of it. I am sick of your bullshit. I am sick of your sabotage. You will never say that again, do you understand?
I might have argued that it was his unrealistic deadlines that were demoralizing the team. Instead, I spread the blame over the whole Board. Milburn did not take that well, either.
Me: Fear is being communicated to the team by the Board of Directors.
Milburn: The Board simply wants you to meet a deadline for once! You feel fear because we need you to live up to one of your deadlines?
Me: We are on track to meet my estimated deadlines.
Milburn: Your estimates are bullshit! You keep telling John, "I'll be done tomorrow," and you never are!
Me: Honest communication might clear up some of the confusion.
Milburn: EXCEPT YOU REFUSE TO BE HONEST WITH ANYONE!!!
Me: Why were we not consulted about the change of direction in July?
Milburn: THERE WAS NO CHANGE IN DIRECTION!!!
Me: There was no change in direction back on July 28th?
Milburn: DON'T TRY TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT!!! I AM SICK OF YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS!!!
Me: My tricks?
Milburn: STOP BEING MANIPULATIVE!!!
Me: What?
Milburn: YOU CRACKED UNDER THE PRESSURE OF A DEADLINE!!! THAT'S THE SUBJECT YOU WANT TO AVOID!!!
Me: Why were we told some ridiculous story about Griffin and—
Milburn: YOU CRACKED UNDER PRESSURE!! YOU'RE NOT A MAN, YOU'RE A LITTLE BOY!!!!
Me: —Dennis and John? Why tell us that they went to a Salesforce convention and magically found—
Milburn: YOU'RE A FRIGHTENED LITTLE BOY!!!!
Me: —some investors who were willing to write a check on the spot? Why not tell us the truth?
Miburn: YOU'RE NOT FIT FOR LEADERSHIP!!!! YOU'RE A FRIGHTENED LITTLE BOY!!!!
I wondered if his instincts told him to pre-emptively throw accusations at me before I could throw them at him. By this point, he was breathing heavily. His emotions had got the better of him, to the point that his whole body was seething.
A fascinating aspect of this whole conversation was that he never threatened to fire me. All of these threats and accusations were his way of trying to motivate me to work harder. With almost scientific precision, he had moved through many of the same kinds of tactics that might have sucked a potential customer into committing to a purchase:
• First, he tried to get me to apologize for hurting his feelings — knowing that if I apologized for anything, then I would have to apologize for everything.
• He tried to shame me by insinuating that I was slowing down my co-workers. "You are wasting the time of your co-workers, when they are trying to stay focused on getting the next release out."
• Next he attacked my masculinity. "ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT YOU FAILED???" Many men, especially younger men, might retort with something akin to, "Dammit, even if I have to work 90 hours a week, we are going to succeed!"
• That didn't work, so he switched tactics and tried to make me feel selfish and petty because I had offered an honest assessment of Sital. "You like to blame others, don’t you?"
• None of that worked, so then he tried to get me to commit to something that he could use against me later — and when I didn't rise to the bait, he tried to pressure me into conceding that something was black and white, when it wasn't. "IT’S A YES OR NO QUESTION!!!"
• I tried to raise the issue that John also needed to take some responsibility for the progress of the company, at which point Milburn tried to get me to take on a CTOs level of responsibility. "ONCE YOU RING THAT BELL YOU CAN’T UNRING IT!!"
• Since I didn’t back down, he switched tactics again and focused on limiting what I was allowed to have any say over: "No one ever told you September."
• Finally he attacked my maturity, to imply that I had no authority to offer opinions about co-workers. "YOU'RE A FRIGHTENED LITTLE BOY!!!!"
His tirade could almost be considered a master class in sales tactics, except those tactics were too obvious. The audience is not supposed to see how a magician performs his or her tricks. When I first read about him online, months prior, I assumed Milburn combined penetrating emotional insights with the expressive range of a great actor. But that was not what I had run into today. He really possessed just a handful of gambits, and he leaned on them too heavily, like a chef who tries to hide their mistakes by using a lot of salt.
By this point we had been talking for so long that it was time for the meeting with the entire team. We had to end our call.
I played a support role all day, helping Sital work through some of his errors, and then in the evening helping Gregory make some progress on the final confirmation stage of the Conversation FSM.
As much as I enjoyed the technologies involved, I refused to work in an abusive environment, so two weeks later I quit. And my departure caused the project to lose direction and focus.
By this point I’d become good friends with Kwan, so we stayed in touch. Every time I passed through DC we’d get lunch together. But the project was stagnant and barely moved. Every month, for the next several months, John told the team that they were running out of money. Finally, Kwan decided that this startup was a deadend that would never amount to anything, so he got a job at Postmates and he moved out to Silicon Valley, so he could be in the heart of the tech industry.
The surviving team consisted of John and Sital, full-time, and Greg part-time. They hung on, without making progress, till 2017, and then they really did run out of money. At most, a total of $600k was spent. I’ll never know the truth of the situation, but it is clear they never had $1.3 million.
Everything I learned when I built my own company has convinced me that an early-stage startup must be a transparent learning organization or it is dead. But to achieve that kind of transparency, the top leadership needs to be respectful: the team members have to know they can be honest with you and you won’t respond with anger.
So I tell this story to emphasize that abusive leadership is usually self-destructive. There is some alternate universe where the leaders of Celelot were open and honest and direct, so that I could share all the wisdom that my experience allowed me to share, and the leadership could share with me their honest concerns about budget and deadlines. And in that alternate universe, it is possible that Celelot became a huge success. But in this world, Celelot destroyed itself. And the abusive and dishonest leadership is the main reason for that failure.
If anyone is interested in the full story, read my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps.