14 DAY TRIAL // Users might have been taken aback by Secret’s co-founder decision to close down the app all of a sudden and without any previous notice, but they were not the only ones in this situation.
Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures, made headlines with his most recent declarations for the New York Times. He expressed his disapproval of the unforeseen decision and blames the founders for being unable to keep the reins of the company.
Since things seemed to be working pretty well for the app that had managed to garner more than 15 million users in almost a year since its launch, the closure was quite unexpected.
However, at the end of last month, CEO David Byttow announced in a post on Medium that "with a heavy hard" he felt obliged to let everyone know that he had taken the decision to shut down the service for good.
The CEO failed to provide a satisfying explanation
Besides the fact that he did not offer any valid reason for the closure, barely saying that the app no longer portrayed his initial concept and what he had envisioned in the beginning, he seems not to have given much thought to its investors either.
Being one of the companies which funded the app, Google Ventures has every right to condemn the reckless actions of the CEO.
To top that, it was revealed that employees had not been informed about the closure in advance and that they had found out about upcoming events from the app itself.
Marris took a firm stand and expressed his disapproval of the project he had once backed, saying that the only thing left to do is to return the money that the application had obtained from investors as soon as possible.
Although the CEO has committed himself to do so, it is yet unclear how he will manage to keep his promise, given that each of the two founders kept around $3 million (€2.66 million) each from the investment, a practice that the Google Ventures partner did not endorse at the time, comparing it to a "bank heist."