Finance Geek

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The 2012 non-Retina display MacBook Pro gets a 7 out of 10 repairability rating from iFixit. Not being ultra slim has its pros when it comes to fixability.

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Built-in voice control for smartphones is growing. First there was Apple’s Siri. Then Samsung’s S Voice. And now LG is introducing Quick Voice.

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It’s a problem when you have one device running low on batteries, but it’s even more difficult when you have two or three all in need of a little juice. I’ve run into this on road trips with my family. We’ve each got a gadget but the car only has two outlets so that means a spiderweb of wires and splitters. It also means we’re all searching for outlets at hotel stops and then trying not to leave anything behind the next day. The myCharge Portable Power Bank 6000 is an easy solution to this problem.

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Twitter is where you hang out with friends and meet new people. Now you can hang out with brutal pro-Kremlin warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.

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Two months ago I announced that Choose Your Own Adventure books were now available in the iBookstore. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to try out one of the books on my iPad. I have to say, it is great. The transition to the digital medium works very well. Though I hadn’t read one of these books since I was a kid, the experience hadn’t deteriorated over time, and the new interactive features made turning pages much faster. Also, I didn’t accidentally see some of the other storylines.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! JC Penney’s stock got clobbered yesterday after the company announced the sudden departure of its president, Michael Francis. Yesterday’s drop only added to the woes of J.C. Penney’s shareholders, who have seen the value of the company nearly cut in half over the last three months. The stock has [...]

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Today Wired is attending Microsoft’s Windows Phone Summit to learn what’s next for the company’s mobile operating system.

We’re expecting Microsoft to announce a number of upgrades to its Windows Phone OS, including potentially unveiling its next major iteration, Windows Phone 8 Apollo. Upgrade incompatibilities for older Windows Phone devices is one question that’s arisen, particularly …

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Microsoft’s core business remains licensing software to partners who make the machines that run it. Which raises the question: Does Microsoft even care if the Surface sells? Some analysts don’t think so.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The outcome of the Greek elections and hope for more action from the Federal Reserve has taken some pressure off Europe’s financial markets. European stocks have rallied in recent days and bond yields in Spain and Italy fell Wednesday after the G20 made unspecified pledges to “take all necessary [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In the last few years, few economists and strategists have been as vocally bearish as Gluskin Sheff’s chief economist and strategist David Rosenberg. But there is a trend sweeping America that has caused Rosenberg to ease up on his negative outlook and lean a bit more bullish. “I do [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! By David Chalian Mitt Romney has said he would like to possibly fold the federal Department of Education into another agency or, at the very least, significantly shrink its size, but that doesn’t stop President Barack Obama’s Education Secretary form agreeing with Romney that education is the “civil rights [...]

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It is an unfortunate fact of life that hiring is an inexact science and mistakes will get made, even if the recruitment process is best in class and executed with diligence. It is simply impossible to know for sure how people will work out until you have been working with them for a while. On top of that companies change as they grow and there are some people who are great at the early stages but aren’t so good when process and discipline become important.

So even the best startups and founders will most likely have to fire someone. In two of my recent investments the short company history up to the Series A included parting company with a senior member of the management team and I took that as a positive. Firing someone senior in the early stages of a company’s life is espescially difficult and I was pleased to see the founders in question had the courage and discipline to take a hard decision.

I’m writing all this because I’ve just read an excellent post on the topic of firing people from Chis Dixon, a prominent US entrepreneur and angel investor. It’s so good I’m going to quote it in full:

Firing is awful. You can try to avoid it, but even the most selective founders make serious mistakes. Here are a few things I’ve observed about firing:

1) The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down. I was told this by my boss once when he was firing one of my friends. At the time, I thought this just made him feel better about himself. Over time, I’ve seen the wisdom in what he said. Some people who get fired react by fixing their weaknesses. Others spiral down.

2) Do it early. If you think you’re going to fire someone over the next six months, you probably will. Don’t wait too long. Too many founders do. It’s better for management and employees if it happens fast.

3) It’s awful. You’re in control of a situation that will meaningfully hurt someone. It’s an awful place to be. The fired person will go home and tell his/her family about how terrible it was. It was your fault. Perhaps your mismanagement caused it. Who knows. You’ll question it, and perhaps you are right to do so.

4) The other choice is firing everyone. You’re the founder of the company. If you run out of money, you’re forced to fire everyone. If you don’t fire the bad employees, you risk everyone else’s jobs. It’s an impossible situation.

5) The feeling is more likely to be mutual than you think. Most of the time, the person getting fired was already about to quit. The antipathy you feel is likely reciprocated. It’s surprising how often this happens and management doesn’t see it coming.

It would be great if startups were all about growth, hiring, and success. But the reality is that founding a company is a brutal job and lots of the pain gets passed down to employees. Creative destruction sounds nice in textbooks, but in the real world it means telling friends to go home, stop getting paid, and find new jobs.

 I also want to bring out two of the comments:

If you’re doing your job firing someone should never come as a surprise to them. I’ve fired pleanty of people over the past 20 years and the vast majority are still valued contacts and many are even friends. Being proactive mitigates 90% of the issues of firing someone but that makes it no less difficult to do…particularly the first time you do it!

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The amount of build-up it usually requires for you to even approach the subject of firing someone prevents you from making a mistake.Firing someone sucks. You don’t fire people “on the bubble” in your mind. You fire people as a last resort.

This last comment is important. Firing people is a last resort. The right thing to do for the individual and the company is always going to be to try and find a way to make things work. In some cases it won’t be possible and then the right thing to do is to quickly recognise when that is the case and take appropriate action.

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