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Several comments leap out

1. To all intents and purposes this is a co-op model of an agency.

2. If the team could not break through to their employers that the employers were in the way and not letting a team of eight build something to help, then why do they think they can do this repeatably (is the value of an agency the ability to build valuable stuff or to persuade business to take the valuable stuff it needs?)

3. This should be the model for the future. Damn it, succeed damn it.




The company in question did let the dev team build the product. However, said company's tech leadership has been in a state of constant flux and apparently the management du jour no longer wanted what their predecessors wanted.

(Note: I used to work for this same company in this very dev team, although I left long before this happened and Adel was among the few left from those days.)


That is kind of what I meant - changing management teams, and same teams changing their minds, is one of the great problems of traditional agencies (and the rest of us!). Stopping it, or getting out in front of it, is probably the main survival skill an agency needs (along with building a pipeline)

Ultimately this is a nice idea but which are we - a team of developers who do not want to be an agency? An agency with a twist? This matters because it defines how people hire them and view them.


Yes, but even the best agency will every so often run into a bad client. I think that's analogous to what happened here.


Not sure what you mean by co-op here do you actually mean a worker coop?

Most ad agencys are not coops the only high profile ad agency coop is no longer a coop (the egos in an ad agency don't lend it self to a coop structure)


Yes, and they suffered from many of the same issues co-ops suffer from - expectations of salary privacy and others judgements being made public, etc

There is nothing stopping a co-op agency. It's just awkward I guess


From bitter experience Main issue for worker coops is access to capital you do all have to be signed up to the coop principals.

Ad agencies tend to have people with strong egos that won't accept some of the trade offs i.e. 1 member one vote and an equal share of profits.




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