On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:17:27 -0500, Matt Hogstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
>Well done Dave. Succession planning is under rated and hard to do. Thanks >for thinking forward and ignore the FUD. The other thing, speaking as someone who sold a smallish enterprise software company to a rollup: If you are a user of z/XDC you should be applauding this. Not to be morbid here, but Dave isn't going to be around and coding forever. Hopefully this move provides some continuity for the users. Even if it is at a higher price, well then at least you have a choice: keep paying or drop it. If Cole Software simply evaporated then you would not even have a choice. Also, and speaking only for myself, not Dave of course, I worked 60-hour weeks for over ten years to build my software company. I put every penny into capitalizing (translation: buying computers, running ads and paying salaries) my little company. I could not afford a significant IRA and we could not afford 401(k) fees until fairly late in the game. A "liquidity event" (as it is euphemistically called in the trade) was my only hope of a retirement plan. I am still coding, and Dave says he wants to keep coding, but I at least no longer had the energy to lie awake night after night worrying about some damned detail of running a software company. For those of you who have not done it, running a small software company is hard, keep-you-up-at-night work. I had a key manager's husband be the victim of murder by the jealous husband of his paramour -- you think that's an easy employee issue to deal with? I had two instances of sexual harassment significant enough to warrant formal counseling for the employees involved. I had our then only salesperson quit the morning of our first-ever trade show. (And my mother had passed away the day before.) I didn't want to deal with those things for the rest of my life. I love coding. Not that stuff. So I sold the company. Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
