All about the Kinder™
Chief Bullshit Officer
By Adam Kinder on Jun 19, 2008 in
It’s rant time, with a pinch of whining thrown in, served up with a warning to those of you with “companies” that aren’t real or registered.
FACEBOOK USERS: Click ‘Original Post’ to view more.
For starters, E29 has been shopping around for an acquisition, and it has revealed some disturbing things about the interweb small business market. Mostly, you guys are a bunch of liars and don’t seem to understand basic business rules.
Once thing that I’m absolutely tired of explaining while reaching out to some of these guys is that we’re on the latter part of M&A. Acquisition, not merger. I’ve had Mr. Slick hand me some numbers during due diligence and propose a merger or a reverse acquisition of E29, while on paper his company makes 1% of what we do. His reasoning is that it would be cool to announce they had bought another company.
That’s usually when I cut off communication, as I now know that everything goes downhill from there. I talked with one owner that has a very professional site, large community, and tosses around ‘enterprise’ and ‘Fortune clients’ on the site. They make under $1,000 per year. Yeah. Cheap acquisition, sure, but I would be better off spending the money on a fast food franchise in town.
What really creates some milk-nose worthy stories are the market leader “companies” and their army of titled officers. Companies in quotes because as we find out through conversation is that they aren’t even registered. I will say this once more, and in bold. IT IS ILLEGAL FOR YOU TO USE INC OR INCORPORATED IF YOU ARE NOT A REGISTERED CORPORATION. In fact, depending on state laws, I can sue you for falsely leading me to believe that you were a real company. Juicy I know, but I’m not going to waste time and money to shut down a “company” whose only record of existence is a website / forum riddled with empty press releases and misspellings.
On to the next pet-peeve of mine. The titles. Seriously, people, what the fuck is a “Chief Compliance Officer”? Considering your company isn’t even real, what does the CCO do? What about “Chief Legal Officer”, “Chief Market Officer”, etc. These guys fill their C level spots by recruiting 14 year old’s from Myspace, honestly. It’s beautiful to find this out during a call to discuss buying the company. You get a guy on the phone with the title “Chief XXX Officer”, who then informs me that he has no clue where the Articles of Incorporation are, or what officer’s hold ownership in the company, who is on the board, etc.
“Go to our forum and click on ‘Officers’ to get the list” is not the right answer.
So to sum up, if you don’t have a real company, drop the Inc off your name. Stop giving every damn person you talk to a C level position in the fake company, and if you don’t make more than $100 a year, just give it up.
“But Adam, what about E29? You guys hardly ever update your site, you finally released a product after a year of vaporware…”
Just like my dog, I have papers. We also snuck out of the product-company scene on purpose, now over 90% of our business is in direct billable contracts. We also make much more than $100. And we only have two C executives, and that’s all we will ever have.
To end on a lighter note after all the bitching, I want to plug some companies that get it right. No bullshit, no buzzwords without substance, and no “Im CEO bitch” posturing. They also actually sell things, not just talk about eventually making things to sell:
Accord5 – They outbid E29 for Trellis Desk and the whizkid that created it, but I still like ‘em 
AH Modding – Awesome community mods. Although he did stop taking custom requests recently, if you can get in on their custom stuff, it’s pure gold.
MetalAxe – If I could adopt anyone, it would be Keith and Kevin. I have heard only good things about them, and the quality of their custom stuff and products is the best on the market.
A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.
Back to coffee and coding.
The whole fake company thing is something which really annoys me generally about the Internet. One in particular always makes me laugh and I think they have a Chief Compliance Officer…its probably the same one you mentioned. I *generally* stay away from companies where they only have email as a contact method, unless I *know* its reputable.
In the UK it is alot easier to tell fake companies. It is the law to state certain information, including registered company number, registered company address and some other information on websites and email communications as well as printed stationary. Although Sole traders and partnerships don’t have the requirement of displaying that information on websites, but I believe distance selling regulations mean that if they chose not to have those details on the website, they would have to give them to you before you go into business with them.
I’m kind of sad I didn’t see this sooner. Thanks for the nod. We’re hoping to actually release some stuff within the next couple months or so. Our Consulting Division has been taking the priority away from our Software Division, sadly. C’est la vie … We’ve got to make money to stay in business.
Thanks.
I know the feeling, we’re trying to staff up to keep our release dates from doing the all too familiar slide, but it’s an uphill battle.
It’s particularly bad if you’re having the same problems hiring that I’ve been having.
In two weeks of posting our job opening we received something like 70 or 80 resumes that I sifted through to get about 20 people that I wanted to talk to. Of those 20 people, 12 went through a formal interview. Of those twelve, 5 were brought onto existing projects as a contract-to-hire to see how well they would mesh with our existing team and systems. Of those 5 people, only 1 was actually hired.
Finding competent people who aren’t currently employed at a place they’re happy with has been incredibly hard, so far. Maybe my standards are too high. I don’t know.
[...] Companies and Honorable Mentions Adam Kinder of E29 Incorporated put up a blog entry on the internet’s phenomenon of producing fake companies. Omega Vortex got an Honorable Mention on his list of companies that get it right: A runner up that [...]