Hey Codesmith, what happened to Parallel?

I don't know why the website went down, but I know some people who were part of it and it's kind of a fundamentally flawed idea. They would hire alumni to work on projects. the only project I've heard spoken about is some kind of negotiation bot possibly in relationship with a team at Harvard and possibly with the data science and machine learning initiative. The fundamental flaw though is that these alumni have busy jobs and their jobs are their priority. many of them just started their jobs and they want to do well. so spending some of their free time on contract projects. they're just not going to do their best work on those projects as good work as they're doing on their job. and if you're going to hire a team, you want to hire a really good team to work on a project. not like a bunch of people who are doing this on the side. Second really strong tech companies. don't let you moonlight or do IP contributions to similar projects and you need to get them approved. so the people who are working on these tend to be people who had less strong jobs to begin with. so not only is it their side time but it is weaker engineers who are not as far along in their journey. I also think the website misrepresents their partners. when you actually have partnerships to call someone a partner you need a formal written agreement and they call far too many people partners who they do not have those for. Like my company has formal written agreements with three FAANG companies and the amount of due diligence restrictions lawyers involved is non-trivial and the way that they throw around the word partner on there trivializes those partnerships which makes it non-believable which then makes companies not want to work with them. Anyways, overall, it started during a time when Codesmith was bringing in like $10 million a year and they were putting money into all kinds of things and then when the market tightened up they cut a lot of stuff and have real finance people reviewing stuff and I think this is one of the things that is just more half-baked and doesn't really make sense business-wise or branding wise.

I've just been rewatching Silicon Valley this past week haha. Hits too close to home... I have some friends that consulted on the show.

Yeah I think Eric is good intentioned, he just doesn't have the top tier, best of best experience he portrays in public sessions. He has good negotiation advice, but it's off the shelf stuff that is the basics in the top tier tech industry. From the people I've worked with navigating more complex offers, he hasn't had strong advice. One of his alumni had an offer pulled because they negotiated a non-negotiable offer. I don't know everything myself but I have enough industry experience to gently steer people through these conversations and try to help people not just negotiate an offer now, but make a plan for the next few years. RE: "selling his company to Disney". That is correct, he didn't sell it and shouldn't be portraying it that way. He in fact helped the final engineer transfer out his prized asset Coolspotters to a 3rd party that wasn't Disney and he's well aware Disney had no interest in his company. The main company's website was purchased by an adult-entertainment affiliate company. Not to mention that Eric left the company years before it closed (and remained loosely involved as board member, one of the two final engineers doesn't know who he is). What happened was that his co-founder, Aaron, previously left the startup and went back to ESPN (part of Disney) and as the company was failing and down to it's last employees. Aarron wanted to hire the final couple of employees so they "bought some assets" from the startup with the intention of paying back the investors and keeping positive vibes for his future. Eric was a part of wrapping up the company but did not join ESPN and was not hired as a part of this. Anyways, yeah I did a deep dive on this he has toned down the "sold my company to Disney" vibe since then, so I think we can settle this.

I heard that comment twice myself about his son. I spend all my time with silicon valley people and he comes across like a lot of founders. Everything is always going great, fake it til you make it. Problem is this isn't a game of a photo app... we're talking about people's lives and we're talking $22K tuition and people need to have better.

I mean the standards were created to help bootcamp's market. CIRR has an obligation to support its members and their success and its members are the bootcamps not students

It's over a month and the site is still down, so I think it's indeed gone. Surprised it wasn't discussed anywhere and just quietly shut down.