ROLI's writing on the wall happened

[Double Tap]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

I read one, then I read all five. The Glassdoor we've always wanted.

[aMUSEd]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

I read one, then I read all five. The Glassdoor we've always wanted.

lol 'Lambsplain'

[masterhiggins]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

I highly recommend everyone read this. It’s very well-written and entertaining. Very hilarious. Lol.

[Amberience]

As I said in the other thread:

I'm highly dubious about ROLI's future. I don't think that ROLI can afford to keep making blocks or Seaboard. They still owe a ton of cash to their creditors and suppliers. They burned through money chasing a x10 valuation pipedream; it was never going to happen. You actually need to have customers for that to happen.

Let's say you spend 5+ years treating your suppliers like creditors. Even if you had the money... would you expect your suppliers to care about having your business? I wouldn't.

So they're left with a product that does not make sense in the market that put the company where it is.

- Pro's aren't going to buy a light up keyboard based on design alone (esp. when the design looks cheap and tacky) and as a controller it doesn't have the feature set or build quality to entice them.
- Amateurs aren't going to hang around for year-on-year to subscribe to their learning platform. They'll do a year at most, then give up, like most people who attempt to become musicians do.
- You can't learn to play piano on a 2 octave keyboard. But the upsell story to buying two or more LUMI's is not strong enough.

They can throw as many Youtubers at it as they want, I'm not holding my breath.

Geist2 is an annoying situation for me. I wasn't the product owner on it, but I was involved in helping design parts of it and speccing up some features with the developer. So I'm very fond of it and from a personal perspective, watching it wither away is pretty sad. That's not any of the FXpansion crew's fault btw. I'll stick my neck out that far.

Likewise with Bloom and Maul. I'm super fond of those and used them all over my bands 2015 album.

In the crazy land of venture capital (yay! let's spend other people's money!!!) if you've got a healthy subscription userbase, you can get a x10 valuation on your company. Which is great if you wanna prepack it all together and flog it off to the highest bidder.

ROLI can't afford to make hardware. It aint happening.


Eventually the whole story should be told, as a warning to future music tech companies about how you raise money and how much emphasis you choose to put on "company culture" versus "making products" versus "losing money" versus "making money" versus "having happy customers" versus "the customer needs to listen to US! WE ARE THE KINGS!!!"


Ehhh. Meh. The whole thing is just a damn shame.

[Amberience]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

I read one, then I read all five. The Glassdoor we've always wanted.

lol 'Lambsplain'

Yeah, that had me howling.

[Harry_HH]

Anyone knows details what, and in what time frame, ex-Fxpansion ex-ROLI product BFD will happen (disappear?) from Fxpansion/ROLI site, if you have not migrated all your BFD stuff?

[pdxindy]

Geist2 is an annoying situation for me. I wasn't the product owner on it, but I was involved in helping design parts of it and speccing up some features with the developer. So I'm very fond of it and from a personal perspective, watching it wither away is pretty sad. That's not any of the FXpansion crew's fault btw. I'll stick my neck out that far.

Likewise with Bloom and Maul. I'm super fond of those and used them all over my bands 2015 album.

It would be great if Geist found a new home. I still consider it the best all around software drum machine/groove box, even though it has languished for years now.

I so appreciate how one could sample right in Geist, quickly make kits from various softsynth sounds and that it always felt effortless for those kits to work together, to gel as a kit. Geist has some mojo in that way.

In a happy fantasy, Tremor also somehow comes back from the dead.

[ThomasHelzle]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

Wow, if this is authentic, the whole thing is even more absurd than I thought it is already.
And brilliantly written too, quite the poet, Arnold.
"Lambsplain" should go big
Sounds exactly like the times of the old dotcom bubble startups.

Thanks a lot for this link, made my day

So yeah, well earned fail and the next round is already booked solid.

Cheers,

Tom

[ThomasHelzle]

Support team experience at Roli:
"There are hundreds of customers venting at us everyday, I can't speak to them all and it's making things worse.
I'm so burnt out I'm, like, throwing up at work and shaking all day and having panic attacks on the train...".

Wow.

[ThomasHelzle]

"R.o.l.a.n.d's guide to product management

We start a conversation with a product, and the customer directs it.
Last year we aimed to hit two targets in different postcodes with a
single bullet. Incredibly we missed both, so two groups of
disappointed customers are giving us conflicting feedback. Thanks
largely to me, we are smashing this empathy thing again by finding
out what the loudest ones are complaining about, and ignoring
everyone else.

We’re focusing our development effort on certain sectors, which is a
polite way of saying that we’re reluctantly removing 10% of our
feature requests. (And cutting 50% from our R&D schedule.) The great
thing about slimming down our feature set to its bare essentials is
that I get to test a really focused, clean product on the plane, and
call you mid-flight every day with new demands for features.

If something sucks, be it a product or a feature or a bug, let’s say
it sucks, and then have hard conversations. In case you've just
joined us, this is how I renew my permission to be openly rude about
your team and their work, demand demos mid-sprint at short notice,
take ownership of every meeting I attend, and insult your
intelligence implicitly, and your interpersonal skills explicitly,
in public. You can’t be trusted to understand what’s best for your
team or the customer. Only I can, because I own your team and I am
your customer.

I’ve built a great relationship with Apple. Right now I'm talking
and you may thank me when my lips stop moving. We’re depending on
Apple to make our products and company viable, because their best
and only interest is to boost ROLI and that will totally work. I've
told the Garageband team that they have to place ROLI's priorities
before their own, and to reposition the app as a prosumer product.
Nothing can go wrong.

Dimitri, your mouth is moving. I've told you before."

-----------------------------------------------

Whoooooaaaaa.
I've once worked for a guy like this for a couple of months.
I still get chills when I read something like this.
Toxic squared...

Lamb to the slaughter indeed.

[gaggle of hermits]

the fact that Roli made it as far as it did is a testament to how resilient groups are even in the face of terrible leadership. well, that and 70million-odd quid keeping the lights on.

i like the hardware i've got from them for the most part (as well as stuff that came from fxpansion originally) and mostly tuned out the daft apps (noise etc) and can only assume it happened because enough of the team was able to deliver stuff in spite of the ceo's micro-management. maybe they got the work done while he was off going to see pharrell, grimes and other stars.

[ThomasHelzle]

"resilent" is an interesting choice of words there...

[Amberience]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

Wow, if this is authentic, the whole thing is even more absurd than I thought it is already.
And brilliantly written too, quite the poet, Arnold.
"Lambsplain" should go big
Sounds exactly like the times of the old dotcom bubble startups.

Thanks a lot for this link, made my day

So yeah, well earned fail and the next round is already booked solid.

Cheers,

Tom

It is authentic. No I did not write it.

[ThomasHelzle]

It is authentic. No I did not write it.

Then we can only hope that the people involved find new and better places to work.
Toxic workplaces kill.

Cheers,

Tom

[masterhiggins]

meetings notes from a former employee.

https://github.com/ArnoldBalm/ROLI

I read one, then I read all five. The Glassdoor we've always wanted.

lol 'Lambsplain'

Yeah, that had me howling.

This has probably been asked, but you don’t have anyone you can talk to about rehoming Geist/tremor/bloom/etc. do you? Or is that impossible because of the bankruptcy?