>>.. the great thing into which they pour all that money turns out to be all wrong, you can't do it this way, you have to do it that way... Any natural internal organization that was built with the app is out the window and replaced with a hierarchy of guys who don't quite know the app, but are experts at bossing. And sometimes it's amazing how little money can give you control. Loan half a million (not invest, loan!) into a company already worth a couple of million, and you can hire and fire.
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>We used to call that "when marketing got hold of the company"

From the (necessarily small) sample I have gathered, the marketing was already done, the company was thriving - and then the vulture capitalists stepped in.

Sometimes I think they don't even want to make more money. They just come off on the feeling of power, the control, bossing people around, that kind of thing. The product may suffer, the company may crumble (and vanish, been there suffered that), but they will still feel great about crushing yet another self-grown democracy (into whose results they just bought in) and imposing a hierarchy with themselves on top and their senior yelling corporals on the lower rungs.