Shaun Clowes: evaluation

Transcript context

…That wasn't Atlassian? No, that was far pre-Atlassian, but very bad. Yeah, the one I like to talk about, I wasn't directly responsible for it, but I feel responsible for it. I was at a company and we launched a product. That was one of those products that in hindsight should have been really obvious it was going to fail, but for some reason we were all blinded by the potential. It was a product that was about, it was basically to measure the environmental impact of your company and to help you reduce the environmental impact of your company by doing, think about it as a power management, building power management, managing the power drawer of computers, managing the power drawer of AC and all of that stuff. That was the vision basically. It's like a manage your environmental impact of your business. The idea was pretty cool at the time, and also it was the right time for that, and it's still a thing. It's still an area of active research and investment or whatever, but it was one of those things, talk about the wrong company, wrong place, wrong time, wrong distribution. We had literally no right to win, no right to play, just absolutely no business in hindsight being in that business. And I feel really bad because I, again, good idea, wrong company. And at the end of the day, we launched the product. We actually kept the product in market for two years, and the final straw was weird. The final straw was actually when a customer finally wanted to pay for it. It had been in market for two years, and we found ourselves with a customer who wanted to pay millions of dollars for it. They were ready to sign on the dotted line, and that was actually the moment we decided to kill the product because we were like, "If this person signs this piece of paper, we are stuck with this forever. This one customer will be bound by contracts for however long or whatever." So we actually ended up killing it. At the moment after two years of failure when somebody wanted to pay his money for it. And I look back on that and I'm just like, "Man, that was a really big..." I feel really bad because I'm like, "It should have been obvious. It was obvious and we should have been able to call a spade a spade and I guess speak truth to power." But instead it kind of got through to the keeper and turned out to be a real accidental drain on resources for years and just a big mistake. So is the lesson there, just be real with yourself? I like that you have this forcing function of like, "Okay, this is getting for real now." Is it like, "I wish we had an earlier forcing function to force us to make a decision?"…

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