Charles, Thanks for sharing. Having a software company is hard work with the same problems that large companies are facing ... I understand you and David, although I am still young, only 66 ;-) and love what I am doing.
ITschak *| **איטשק מוגזך | במאי | תוכנת SecuriTeam **| ** פלטפורמת IronSphere **| **אבטחת מידע ניטור **רציף ** עבור Z/OS, zLinux ו-IBM I **|* *| **מייל **: **[email protected]** | **Mob **: +972 522 986404 **| **סקייפ **: ItschakMugzach **| **אינטרנט **: **www.Securiteam.co.il** |* On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 8:28 PM Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
