That 50-person breaking point for informal/humane treatment is what I have observed as well. By the time the company reaches that size you can’t help but hire a couple “politicians”, and they begin to metastasize, and bring their mafia in. If I ever do a startup again, I will aim to stay fairly small, and politicking will be a fireable offense with very low tolerance threshold.
Interesting to see how o'reilly has changed since then.
It's overly difficult to buy O'reilly books anymore that aren't counterfit anymore.
You'll notice this if you buy several of them at a time, you'll get ones that are different sizes, different weights, different paper thickness, yellow pages, various printing issues.
The problem is that they only sell through Amazon anymore, so chinese publishers are just copying them and selling counterfit versions in the same listing.
I tried to inform them after my last batch of counterfits, but the customer service person I spoke with was only interested in closing my request.
Their distribution through Amazon would also mean that all of this Africa stuff is likely a thing of the past as well.
Very refreshing to read an account of both success and failure that is humane and devoid of buzz and bullshit. My internal picture of Tim O'Reilly has never gone past "That's a publisher, they have that unique cover design!", but this article alone makes me default to a great respect for the guy. Worth reading!
>When Barnes & Noble or Borders returned books to us, stickered and unsalable, we didn’t pulp them; we sent them to Africa, where they could be useful to people who couldn’t afford them.
Africa isn't your personal dumpster. If a book isn't good enough for americans, it's not good enough for anybody.
