You haven't upset me at all. What upsets me is seeing you continue to rip people off and, indirectly, having helped you take peoples money. Your 'Synergy Story' is a travesty.
To other readers of the forum, and in the interest of full disclosure: I worked for Nick for two years, until May this year. My reasons for leaving were essentially not wanting to work as the sole remaining engineer in the company, under the shit-show that is Nicks leadership. Just before my departure, Jerry, my team mate, and dear friend, who had been at the company for five years, left for personal reasons. Our web developer left as I did, and for reasons similar to my own. We were both just exhausted and fed up with not being able to do meaningful work to the best of our ability or with any sense of autonomy.
Nick made the rest of the team, 5 people, redundant more or less straight away. Everyone. Including our office manager and book keeper, who had absolutely no hands in product.
None of your customers want to hear your sob story about building and investing in your company, and it's *extremely* rich for you to do so having burnt down a perfectly viable one, full of intelligent and passionate people, which had a product (Synergy 2) which by now, had you had the guts to see it through, would have been entering a stable phase. Do I want to do be a founder? No. Am I cut out to be a founder? No. What I *do know* is that almost every founder you'll ever read about makes huge sacrifices to get their company going. Most though, have the good sense not to try and *cash out* in the middle of a product launch when revenue is flat-lining and, literally, the entire company thinks you're wrong about product decisions, let alone business decisions. But you just wouldn't listen.
I'd go so far as to say that *everyone* in the company circa April 2018 cared FAR more about our customers, in their own way, than you did. Steve (our dev manager) cared about the quality and delivery of our software. Sarah (support) cared about helping our customers (at least, in the beginning, before the hopelessness of the company not actually being able to deliver, ground her down), and Nick (not the above Nick, our marketing manager was also called Nick) cared about being transparent and honest with our customers in our marketing material. I, myself, cared wholeheartedly about Synergy 2's design and the privacy and security of our users (The issues for which, Nick, you probably can't even enumerate, but were picked up by analysts in the wild as early as January 2018.)
I could write pages and pages and pages about how, when we raised concerns that had a direct effect on our customers, the entire team was regularly shot down by Nick Bolton. How shortcuts were made to meet an arbitrary deadline (arbitrary because we had a stable product in v1 which could sustain the company), and how he guided development of v2 down its rocky path.
Nicks idea of 'caring about the customer' is delivering 'vision', rather than value, to customers. Value means quality representative of the price you're paying. It means well-tested, well designed software delivered as alpha at best, until it's feature complete, and beta until it's ready. It means a product road map that's not essentially static for 4 years.
"Rushing it out the door, but also with the dependence on an Internet connection, and the lack of settings." ... these were all Nick Bolton directives. You told me expressly that the product ***must not work*** without our cloud service. You insisted on removing the settings screen, and me and Jerry both knew the planned November 2017 release date was a pipe dream six months out, when you started cancelling infrastructure work in favor of UX bullshit like single sign-on and dicking around with our logo in the UI. Things that can easily be rolled out in point releases.
As the product owner you need to own these decisions. Perhaps it's time to accept that, while you might still be founder and CEO material, you're a shitty product owner.
Oh, and it's nice that you're hiring a 'UX designer' when you walked out of a meeting with, and ignored all the input from, the last UI workflow design consultant you brought in. That decision left me and Jerry (the entirety of the S2 development team) wasting time thinking about different UX design considerations right up until release day... literally 6-9 months after these matters should have been settled so we could focus our energies on under-the-hood.
My assessment, having worked for Nick for 2 years as an engineer, is that he has an exceptionally poor grasp of Synergy as a software design project. I have no belief that he will deliver Synergy 3 and, if and when he does, I do not believe he will have gathered enough technical chops to actually deliver anything but another thin veneer over the bit-rotted Synergy 1.x core: something which he has been milking for profit for years now, without contributing much of significance to, from where the FOSS community left it circa 2007/8 (Except for merging QSynergy, the Synergy+ fork and Synergy itself, a handful of bug fixes, and slapping on SSL)
To prospective employees: I can *not* recommend Nick as an employer. I don't think any of the 7 of us who worked there at the beginning of this year would.
To v1 users I say this: Go support 'Barrier', a completely FOSS continuation of Synergy v1.
For v2 users: Ask Nick for your money back, and go pay for one of the readily available alternatives like Sharemouse, which do actually deliver steady improvements to their product. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
