Has anyone tried approaching any of the investors to improve community-company communication?

Question

We've had woefully poor success attempting to dialogue with the company through Meta, a petition, email, phone, and the Contact Us form.

What attempts, if any, have been made to reach out to members of the Board of Directors (other than Joel Spolsky)?

The composition of the Board: Brad Burnham (Union Square Ventures), Adrianna Burrows (Payscale), Anil Dash (Glitch), Peter Levine (Andressen Horowitz), Neil Rimer (Index Ventures), Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital).

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@Lewis has suggested that to attempt contacting any of them would constitute harassment. I am asking if this has been tried, in order to avoid going back over ground that may have been tried already.

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If anyone wants to write up a post that lays out reasons for or against contacting them, please write a separate question where such a post would be on point.

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January 19, 2020 (one month after posting the question): Has anyone taken Anil up on his kind offer? Has he been responsive? (I was tied up with Winter Session, but have emailed him today.)

Also, a new, related idea: If anyone has some personal connection with Adam Fenty, "special advisor" to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (which invested $40 million in SE in 2014, according to Wikipedia), "hired to advise the firm's portfolio companies on working with local, state, and federal governments," and wants to reach out -- I wonder if that would help? Note, his undergraduate and grad schools were Oberlin and Howard, respectively. If you are an alum from either of these schools -- that might make it easier to make a cold call.

Answer 1

For what it's worth, I'm on the board, and have been following along with pretty much all of the conversations here in Meta. (For perspective, I experience the community as a fairly typical user — low rep, not a mod, I come for answers when I'm working on code, I don't really use Meta.) I'm fine for people to contact me (I'm [email protected]), and I share what I learn from community members with the management team. That being said, I'm pretty much never going to publicly comment directly on things because it wouldn't be respectful to the team that's working on everything if I distract from their efforts. Also, candidly, it's hard to comment without people reading a lot into every bit of phrasing I use or teasing out meanings that I might not have even been aware of, or intended, so I try to refrain from doing so.

Also, I really appreciate that everyone is so thoughtful here about being mindful in the ways you all reach out to people. (Yes, people do contact me all the time about this stuff. No, they tend to not be the people who are as thoughtful as those in this thread. I understand that's not representative of everyone overall.) I'd also say my being accessible is a choice I'm making for me, and others on the board may, for very good personal or professional or liability reasons, not want to open up to that, and I'm not advocating reaching out to them the same way. But anybody here who wants to share something with me is more than welcome to.

To set expectations properly, I can't wave a magic wand and grant any wishes that the community raises. I also can't make a thoughtful, deliberate process go faster than it should; hard, complicated work takes time. If there's something that's been overlooked or that is useful context, I'm happy to pass it along, but I literally can't recall a time when I shared something with the team that they hadn't already considered themselves; typically they understand the issues far more deeply than me and are already working diligently on fixing any problems that are being discussed.

I can say this as a user of the site, and someone who gets a narrow glimpse into how the company works: your words are absolutely heard, and people care deeply about doing the right thing. Addressing complex issues takes time, and I do understand that can be frustrating. But the underlying question here seems to be if the board is aware of what gets discussed here, and whether engaging us would yield a different result for people who are frustrated. The short answer there, speaking only for myself is that I definitely see what people are saying here, and I definitely know the team at the company is working really hard to do right by everyone. I've seen a lot of companies that are dismissive or uncaring about community, and this isn't one, and the fact that so many people are invested in advocating for their vision of the site is the best evidence of that.

I hope this is useful; I wanted to respond because it's so rare that I have a chance at getting an upvoted answer these days. :) (And please don't turn this into an "official statement", that makes it really hard to respond like this! It's just my two cents.)

Answer 2

It is the job of the Board of Directors to make sure that the company is going in the right direction and to evaluate the performance of its officers from an outside perspective. They cannot do that without accurate information, and there is no reason to assume that all of them are aware of the recent problems, and if they are, if they get all of their information from the company it has certainly gone through enough filters that they wouldn't be getting an unbiased view.

It's very appropriate for them to be informed of their company's actions. It's also not too rare in the United States for people who want a company to change behavior to contact the Board of Directors, and to even try to get changes onto shareholder ballots.

UPDATE
Anil Dash is aware of what has been going on, since he is a Meta reader(!), but he doesn't say whether other members of the board are aware. Reading between the lines, it sounds likely that they are, at least to some extent.

Answer 3

Has anyone tried approaching any of the investors to improve community-company communication?

I haven't, and I don't think it would be a good idea, mainly for a reason that haven't seen here yet: you actually have no idea how many other people tried it, and therefore you have no knowledge whether you are the 10th person coming to annoy one of these board members.

In other words: as tempting as it sounds, it is extremely hard to predict how such an attempt of "side channel communication" would come over, and whether you are the only person doing it, or if you are actually just a snowflake in a small avalanche.

If you happen to know one of these people personally, and you happen to meet that person in a casual setup, sure, different story. Then I would probably ask "Do you know what is going on right now, and what are your thoughts on it?"

Beyond that, there is a certain chance that putting up such a list of names leads to a negative effect: that people pick up your idea, and try individually to approach the folks listed in the question.

What could be a valid approach: see if any of these folks talk about SE Inc. or the community on public space, for example their twitter feed. Then it might be reasonable to leave a polite response there. Meaning: responding to a statement is something different then approaching total strangers in unsolicited ways.

Beyond that: I am not afraid of annoying people. But I have seen with my own eyes how people with "good intentions" achieved the exact opposite of the desired outcome when confronting "higher ups" the wrong way.

Thing is: unless you come extremely well prepared, with a clear message, and hard evidence for your arguments, you better think twice before speaking up. Most often, such people have very limited time. The second they consider you wasting their time, that second you start to hurt your goals.

So a random person randomly contacting such folks, without good preparation, and without any sort of "mandate" is unlikely to achieve something useful. And worst case, such a person will be perceived as "typical META user". Adding to the impression that SE Inc. is actually doing the right thing by looking for alternative paths to acquire feedback, from users that really matter, not those toxic META people.

Finally: lucky us, we have one thoughtful board member reading what we have to say. And interestingly enough, that underlines major points made here, and in some comments: they already get contacted, and it seems in pretty un-coordinated ways that aren't that productive.

Answer 4

Encouraged by "I'm fine for people to contact me (I'm [email protected])," I emailed Anil on Sunday, January 19, with an opinion and some questions. (I was waiting until we were past the December break, and past the period of getting back to normal after the break.)

It's now January 27, and I've had no reply. I haven't given up hope -- but it's discouraging.

I have had a response. And Anil said that other SE participants have also corresponded with him too.

Answer 5

To answer the question somewhat indirectly: before approaching any of those board members it might be useful to know how they think.

I just stumbled upon this quotation:

The current business model is recipe for failure. That's the conclusion of Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backed Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Box as startups.....Levine says the conventional open source business model is flawed: Open source companies that charge for maintenance, support, warranties and indemnities for an application or operating system that is available for free simply can't generate enough revenue.

Via http://marktarver.com/thecathedralandthebizarre.html

StackExchange does not run on open source but it is a network of open content sites, so the same considerations apply to the licensing of the content. If you are the kind of person who thinks something is not worth much unless you have exclusive control on it, you might also think that the content of SE sites is not worth much for the company.

SE Inc. is arguably a software company, first of all. All the more so now that its chief business goal appears to be the licensing and hosting of its proprietary software to companies. So it's relevant whether board member Levine downplays "maintenance, support, warranties and indemnities", because it tells you what they may think is the key to success for the company in this market: not support to groups wishing to run a knowledge base, but something else.

I stress both points because in my opinion they are highly questionable. If they made a mistake here, then their entire strategy crumbles. (My personal opinion in the comments.)

Answer 6

This is not intended to fully answer this question. It would be far too long for a single comment. I'm putting my response in an answer here as replying in the comments is leading to a lengthy chain.

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Contacting investors/directors directly may be a bad idea. It may even be considered by some as harassment. Why? Let's try and look at it this way;

By definition, in this question, there have already been 5 attempts to establish dialog

• Meta
• A Petition
• Email
• Phone
• Contact Form

If these don't make it far enough up the chain to be seen by the investors/directors, this is likely by design. They either don't want to see it, or they can't do anything about it if they do (consider they may just be financial backers). Even if they can, it's likely that it would take more than one. Circumventing this by contacting them directly when it hasn't been requested is unsolicited contact.

Aside from the above, what impact do you suppose this would have? If the 5 previous attempts have been ignored / not answered to satisfaction, there isn't likely to be a more favorable outcome contacting them directly.

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Edited to reduce the accusatory tone and to make it clearer that this is not a direct answer, nor am I trying to warn people away. The intention behind this answer is remind people to think before acting.