from Hacker News

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (2018)

by ziptron on 6/22/24, 12:49 PM with 120 comments

by OldGuyInTheClub on 6/22/24, 6:39 PM
As a chemist I know what coumarin is but had no idea of its place in the chemical industry, least of all as a substitute for vanillin which looks nothing like it. Often, two molecules that are just sliiiightly different will have entirely different functions. Here, two molecules that are completely different can be substituted in some capacity.
But, damn, what a fine piece of writing. A seamless connection of facts and reminiscences all taking me somewhere. The author tells his family's and their extended family's story, without all the contortions and schnookery involved in "telling a story" in our marketing-besotted culture.
"Touching the product makes it different" is a remarkable turn of phrase.
by Ozzie_osman on 6/22/24, 4:11 PM
This was a great read.
A few years out of school, I took a detour from tech/entrepreneurship to work in my family business (overseeing operations in a construction manufacturing facility, in Egypt), mostly with my Uncle. In my case, though I fully prefer tech as an industry, the deal-breakers were a dismal economic/political climate and an... interesting Uncle.
Apart from that, a lot of the article resonated. A few other things that stood out and made the transition hard for me were: corruption (in the construction industry, hard to avoid) and culture/hierarchy.
by goodJobWalrus on 6/22/24, 1:26 PM
In case the author is reading this, I am wondering why Dad did not have a succession plan, and was it ever discussed in the family what should happen after? What was dad’s plan?
by iamgopal on 6/22/24, 6:50 PM
Wow !! We have supplied machinery to this company, how wonderful to find such write up at other end of the spectrum. World is small and gol.
by electrodank on 6/22/24, 3:15 PM
Left field comment but I’d love to be thrown into an MBA-like simulator (HBS?) and have to figure out the industry and the company and stabilize it/make it grow and whatnot within some time window.
Great read, thank you to the author who took the time to write up all that, it was very insightful and must have been fucking difficult in many ways.
by Umofomia on 6/22/24, 8:12 PM
I noticed the word 'jugaad' from his speech and looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
It seems like a very befitting word for the eponymous "hacker" ethos of this site.
by amtamt on 6/22/24, 5:29 PM
Maharashtra has a long history of cooperatives, some of whichquite successful. I wonder if employees brought up or were given a option to form a cooperative, if immediate liquidity was not a major requirement.
by didip on 6/22/24, 5:42 PM
Thank you for sharing this unique story. Some parts of your story resonated with my life, hope you don’t mind me sharing:
* At times it felt like the true sons are the companies they started. They live and breathe in them. I have a strange detachment to my own family because of this.
* Thus, they have serious attachment issues and zero succession plans.
* My mom later passed away too soon and missed out much of the life experience she could have had. Glad that she did travel around the world before death.
* Even after all that, my old man still doesn’t have succession plan. Dunno what’s gonna happen to all the people working for him. And the clock is ticking.
* Like OP, I spent most of my life in the US, so I too would be useless in dealing with the businesses. Even the real estate company (something I know a bit in the US) is far too different back there.
Also, blatant corruption is simply not my cup of tea.
I tried to help them multiple times. I offered to sponsor them green card, but they consistently refused. I offered if they need help finding private equity to liquidate and just retire. Sometimes I wonder if my mom could have been saved with US quality healthcare.
Oh well, I did my best, there was nothing I could have done.
by amadeuspagel on 6/22/24, 1:56 PM
Fascinating article, but reading it I kept asking myself: Why not promote someone to CEO? Surely any top-level manager already working at the company will do a better a job then someone who's only qualification is working there 18 years ago.
by skybrian on 6/22/24, 4:39 PM
This is quite a good story. Since it happened in 2018, I wonder what’s happened to the business since then?
by confused_boner on 6/22/24, 6:57 PM
Pitch it to Bollywood, has script potential
by tibbydudeza on 6/22/24, 2:21 PM
Amazing story - shows the importance of succession planning - worked for a family-owned company but the apples did not fall close to the tree - the sons and daughters could not match the father.
Like what happened to Wang.
Today they are technically bankrupt and reluctantly handed over control to seasoned management and they are spinning out parts of the company to raise capital to save the core business.
by parker-3461 on 6/23/24, 4:10 AM
The speech given to the Atlas team was really touching, I actually teared up a bit when reading through it.
@asanwal thank you for sharing this.
by hajrice on 6/23/24, 9:50 AM
Very common that the children don't wish to run the family business – I always wondered why. Wonder how much things would have turned out differently had the Dad introduced the company to his son at a young age and "groomed" him to be the future leader of the organization.
by wdb on 6/23/24, 12:24 AM
My father had a fragrance company (now owned by Givaudan) as client and every time he visited he came back with reproductions of famous perfumes (sampler size). I always found it interesting that they lasted longer or smelled nicer than the original. Of course, most of the time he only brought it back for mom.
First time, I visited, the company with my dad, I was surprised in how much things a fragrance is used. From perfume, shampoo but also cleaning products. It's a fascinating business.
by mizzao on 6/22/24, 2:27 PM
> Candidly, my only qualification to run Atlas at this time was that I was the founder’s son.
It seems like an even more important qualification was that the founder's son was also a founder. Otherwise this would have been much less likely to work.
by langsoul-com on 6/22/24, 2:50 PM
Wonder if the author could speak about how him already being a founder played into the equation.
Let's say he was a software dev, no team lead, no manager, individual contributor. How would things play out?
by starboyy on 6/23/24, 4:14 AM
I worked at CB Insights for a while. One of the best company to work for.
by johndhi on 6/22/24, 3:48 PM
This is incredibly well written (in addition to being substantively compelling). Bravo!
by bprater on 6/22/24, 9:07 PM
"Plus, margin is hard to rally the team around."
"Growth is tangible."
Love the way he packaged this!
by smrtinsert on 6/22/24, 9:13 PM
this was an absolute incredible story. I would absolutely watch a movie about this story. learning history and family through something that at its surface seems so cold and difficult to process is very intriguing, a triumph of small business, cultural differences (americanized indian returns to india), i sense a great film in this story. thanks for sharing!
by renewiltord on 6/22/24, 4:29 PM
Sorry to hear about your dad. Seems to have been a good and smart man.
This was a pretty insightful story. Thank you for sharing it.
by billy99k on 6/23/24, 3:27 AM
My brother died almost 10 years ago and he ran his own software company. He had no plan, because he thought he could beat cancer. His wife had to get his passwords while he was on his deathbed.
The day of his funeral, his wife begged me to look at his work laptop and help her out. She even mentioned us being partners in the company. I was already running my own successful company at the time and had almost no time do this.
I found the time and saved her probably close to $150,000 in customers pissed off because my brother stopped handling support due to his illness, forgotten about purchase orders, and a website that he pre-paid for $20,000 and was never delivered because he died and never told them he was sick. They sent over the entire amount within a few days of me explaining the situation.
I never expected any money for this work, I was just trying to clean up the business and get it back to a functional level. A few months later, when she had time to grieve and think about things, she wanted to talk partnership. Her first offer was to pay me $15/hour, which I rejected (and laughed about later with my wife).
Her second offer was to give me 10% of the company and when her kids turned 18 in 8 years, they would get full control over the company (including my 10%). I was personally offended because she essentially wanted me to maintain and build up the entire company, take a very low percentage along the way, only to hand over the entire company to her kids (my nephews).
When I explained this to her and rejected the offer, she told me that I had no skills beyond 'answering emails' and that I didn't 'understand how business worked'.
Shortly after this, she found an email from my brother's old friend who was very religious. She had also recently found god and as a result, convinced this person that he needed to help her for free. For the last 6 or 7 years, the business has been in maintenance mode with this person answering emails, for free. I know the technical capabilities of this person and most responses are basically re-installing the software or rebooting the computer. I am also in the tech industry and the job this person has is about the level I was at when I was 15 (I'm 45 now).
The result was as I expected: Most of his clients stopped re-purchasing licenses because there is no more support or bug fixes and you also just can't trust the security of software after it hasn't been updated in 10 years.
She now has to work a minimum wage job making meals for the elderly (which isn't a bad thing) and the company is close to bankruptcy. It was good we were never partners, because I probably would not have been able to start my next business.
It took my brother over a decade to build his successful company, and a few years for his wife to destroy it.
by prakhar897 on 6/22/24, 7:20 PM
Great Story! I have a question.
Why didn't you elevate someone from inside to the CEO position? Seems like a great way to maintain ownership (and take care of people) while also rewarding the best employees.
by kylehotchkiss on 6/22/24, 5:35 PM
This is such a heartwarming story. Thank you for sharing about this Anand. I loved the part about how your dad’s legacy is all the children of employees who could continue their education.
by towndrunk on 6/25/24, 12:56 PM
Anyone know of any similar stories like this one? I don't know why, but I really enjoy reading these and hearing the thought process and decisions made.
by boberoni on 6/22/24, 7:29 PM
> business is about growth or margin.
> To grow, we could do 1 of 2 things:
> - Sell more of our existing products, primarily Coumarin
> - Add new products
> If we focused on margin, that’d mean focusing on:
> - Increasing efficiency in manufacturing
> - Reducing expenses
Good insights. I’m curious if there are other models of business that are just as simple and useful… :)
by abledon on 6/23/24, 2:29 AM
heartwarming!
by jacknews on 6/22/24, 3:30 PM
Wouldn't it have been better if ownership of the company, essentially comprised of the workers and managers, actually passed to the workers who knew what they were doing?
To me this just highlights the absurdity of capitalist ownership.
by sspiff on 6/22/24, 2:22 PM
> While I don’t think most people would ever find themselves in a similar situation (I certainly hope not),
I'm not sure what the author means by this. Sad though it may be, most people will experience their dad dieing.
And inheriting control of a company sounds like a 1%'er problem if I ever heard one.
What is OP wishing to spare the rest of us from, exactly?