The same reason sports teams fire their head coach (or manager) when the owners want a change - because it is easy to replace one manager than an entire team.
My experience is that a list of employees ordered by (compensation/contribution) is created, sorted highest to lowest. Those nearer the top of the list are most likely to be let go, those lower on the list are most likely to stay. And, contribution != performance. Profitability (margin) and revenue growth of the product and team affect contribution as much as individual performance.
I used to have a side gig as the CFO for a not-for-profit (an unpaid volunteer). Anyway, this organization was over 125 years old, associated with a larger organization 80 years older than that, and had the same primary bank for 70 years ... Anyway, my treasurer, who was very smart, insisted we keep enough cash to run for 3 months in a secondary bank. Just in case we were locked out of our primary bank.
Not quite the same scenario, but it makes me think of how a startup I know dodged a bullet with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse [0] partly due to having some other money elsewhere Just In Case. (But in a major part due to bailouts, of course.)
Anyone serious about stock trading at the time knew who they were and what they did. They also advertised heavily in print. So anyone who stayed on the call for more than short time had some interest. I had coworkers who "invested" with them.
Exactly this. Corporations can pay up if they want these pieces of critical infrastructure to be more robust. Fully leaning on the passion of people in our profession to do unpaid work because we like the craft is... uncool.
In this case at least reading through the timeline it sounds like the bulk of the discovery of the vulnerability came through paid folks though.
Microsoft aren’t paying, but are still demanding responses to their problems. Now sure you can ignore it (and the ffmpeg lot are a hardened bunch), but I can see how a lone developer can feel pressured by leviathans
Microsoft are being the twats here, not the ffmpeg devs
My experience with non-technical cofounders is: "We already have a CTO. However he/she is too busy/important/senior/all-of-these to build an MVP. What we need is someone to take our CTO's design and code it up, then become employee #1 for, all for 0.5% of the company."
I got the problem wrong because I didn't know he never opens the door picked nor a door with a prize behind it. That's because I hadn't seen the show since I was about 5 years old, because that's about the time I stopped watching daytime TV.
That is also in the problem description. Again, it doesn't matter whether he does or doesn't ever do it (though no game show host would ruin the game).
It is the described problem that matters.
There was so, so much writing like this at the time, people saying "well, if...".
What's the company worth now? I once passed on a similar funding round at a startup that I had left. The investors in that round lost ~80% of their additional capital.
"A few hundred million dollars" is not chump change to any organization; especially one that is in its growth phase. They raised $300M [1] in their last round so that would wipe out the all of the investment money they brought in.
Some missions blow up on the launch pad, or fail to reach orbit, or are lost mid-flight, or crash on landing. I wonder if the average actual mission length exceeds the average expected mission length.
