Living in interesting times

My husband, who is a public relations wunderkind, would surely counsel me to leave well enough alone at this point. My new boss sure did. But I'm the R community guy, not a PR guy, and I feel like I need to speak my mind about the kerfuffle over changes at REvolution Computing that has erupted over the last couple of days. 

As you might imagine, it's been an interesting couple of weeks (in the Chinese proverb/curse sense), waiting for the funding deal to close. I've never been through the process of a Venture Capital firm funding a startup before, but I guess the pattern is familiar to anyone who's been through something like this: VC firm appoints new CEO, VC replaces executive team, employees leave and/or are let go, there is disruption.

From my own personal point of view, it's been a rough couple of days. With the transition of HQ to new offices in Palo Alto, good friends and colleagues in New Haven were suddenly gone. Local coworker-friends -- including my own boss Danese, who I loved working for -- were gone too. I miss them all. But on the plus side, the entire REvolution R Enterprise development and support team in Seattle remains intact, so to say that the company has lost its R experience doesn't seem fair to me. I like to think I have some experience in R myself, actually.

But at least I got to stay (for which I'm glad). For those (not just Danese) who did let go, it was a real, unexpected blow. They have a right to be angry. Danese's blog post led to angry tweets (lots of tweets!). Eventually it spilled over into the mailing lists. I've had emails and phone calls. It's been a rough couple of days -- thanks to Danese and others who sent notes of support, I appreciate it.

But now, onward and upward. The team in Seattle will continue to do their stellar work extending R to make REvolution R Enterprise (the new IDE is looking awesome). And yes (et tu, Baz?) they'll be focussing on the needs of enterprise customers and those in-demand areas of data analysis like the financial sector, life sciences, and predictive analytics. (Those subscriptions pay our salaries, after all.) As for me, I'll be working on the community side of things: our free releases of REvolution R, supporting community events, and building some new online tools for R users that we've been thinking about for a while and now have the money to implement. It's true, I've got a big job ahead of me (not least building out a new Community team in Palo Alto), but I wouldn't have taken on the job if I didn't think it was the right thing for the R project. 

To be sure, I asked Norman directly to make sure that contributing to the R project in a meaningful way and being good citizens in the open-source world was part of his strategy for REvolution Computing. It is.

So I guess the lesson I've learned is that there's real passion in the open-source and R communities about what happens with R. And that's a good thing: R is awesome and cool and the more people that care about it, the better. And come to think of it, that's one of the great things about open source: everyone can be involved, in all sorts of contexts. I know many of my former colleagues will remain part of the broader community and continue to do interesting stuff with R, and even though they may not be with REvolution, I'm looking forward to working with them and the rest of the R community in the future.

Thanks for letting me rant. Your usual Revolutions programming will resume shortly...

Comments

[The Contrarian]

Just remember that when Norman has sucked whatever he needs out of you he'll sack you without notice or severance as well regardless of promises or assurances, just like he did your former friends. Or rather, he'll get your replacement to do it. As I said on your other posting, the community remembers.

[Danese Cooper]

To David's point about R expertise remaining at REvo...Comments in my blog pointed out that the effect of the reorg was to do away with all the original employees, leaving only those with less than a year at the company. This has had the interesting effect of wiping out some expertise, but some remains. So for instance the folks who wrote the ParallelR code in New Haven are gone, but the folks working on the IDE in Seattle remain. I apologize for any confusion caused. -Danese

[Pat]

Out of curiosity, will the exciting-sounding new IDE be open-source/free and available to the community? Or will it only be provided to enterprise customers?

[gappy3000]

To be sure, this has been a PR blunder, although what happened is totally routine. Based on anecdotal evidence however, when VC-driven reorgs happen, rarely the company recovers. I have yet to see a successful exit by companies affected by these changes. On the other side, If things go south, there is reasonable demand for data analytics people... good luck at any rate.

[Barry Rowlingson]

I come here not to bury Dave Smith, but to praise him...[1]

When Splus went all corporate, I think that was when we academics realised the game was up. License fees would get put up, interesting new packages would become optional expensive add-ons, closed-source would be the order of the day.

But Dave saw the light and jumped ship to R. The GPL makes it impossible to close up R in the same way. The commitment to making REvo R the default R in Ubuntu Karmic, with its speed and parallel advantages are a big win for us in academia. I assume - I've not tried it yet - but having people like Dave there mean the links to academia remain strong. Just because all we're doing is modelling tropical diseases, measuring climate change, or working on clinical trials, and not doing anything worthy like making pots of cash for shareholders[2] shouldn't mean we're sidelined by IT companies...

Baz
[1] I'm out of Julius Caesar quotes now
[2] Irony

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