The small and successful company (~100 people) my brother-in-law works at is currently self-destructing, specifically because the CEO is that exact kind of family-loyalty "father figure" wannabe.

Is it failing because he is being taken advantage of or is it failing because he is trying to take advantage of others?

The latter - he valued loyalty over competency (ending up surrounding himself with yes men), and demanded too much of the competent folk until they burnt out and left.

That depends. A lot of them are. A lot of them have owners that actually treat you like family.

Differentiating between the two based on signals during hiring is almost impossible, though.

But I don't want to be treated like family. In particular, I am not ready to have the same level of obligations towards my employers, even if these were reciprocated faithfully. I have my own family to which I'm always going to have a stronger loyalty than to any employer.

A company as a group of close friends? Be my guest. A company that pretends that we have bonds of blood, or are married? Not for me (unless we're actually family, as in family business).

Differentiating between them is impossible until things go wrong. They can treat you as family 99% of the time, but when the options are: take a pay cut or fire some employees, in my experience everyone goes with the latter.

Small companies really magnify the extreems. Good ones are really great but bad ones are extra bad. Sadly, they are also nimble enough to switch between them, at least in one direction.

Not only the extremes, also the speed: good employers can turn into bad employers (has the opposite ever happened? I'd love to learn of an example!), but big companies at least have some inertia while it happens. There's probably even some "Sun" still left, all those years after the Oracle takeover. Compare this to what happened at Komoot.

I have seen the opposite happen, but I'm fairly confident that few people that felt the pendulum swing from good to bad stick around long enough to feel the upward swing.

I do not have an example of the opposite, but I can echo your comment.

I was the first US employee of an Indian consulting startup. I was their engagement lead for a marquee account for the first 4 years and while I do not take all the credit, my management and I grew the account from 1 person to 250 by the time I left. What did I get in return? A 10% reduction in salary from my previous job, almost no pay hikes (there were some) for 4 years, a whole lot of "we are family" talk, and zero stock. Of course I was naive and did not have things in writing, but I still believe they owe me 3% of an 80 M exit price because that's what they verbally told me. But no, good employers turned into bad employers very quickly.

Of course there is a lot more to the story, I had my own faults, but I am not naming anyone and I am not publishing my story here. That life is over, I am not fighting that battle, this was 15-20 years back and I finally did move on and do other stuff.

But that 3% after a decade or more of (well managed) growth would have been awesome.

Anecdotally, a bad employer turns into a good employer only after a death.

Was there something specific at Komoot you’re referring to? Did I miss something in the article or the news cycle in general?

I'm OOTL, what happened at Komoot..? Vaguely interested because I'd considered applying there for a role a year or so back but never went through with it...

Founder(s) sold to Bendinggspoons who specialize in the kind of takeover where the buyer stops all development and tries to keep the money inflow from a service running with minimal maintenance crew. Evernote is the most famous example I think.

Apparently 80% are already gone:

https://escapecollective.com/how-komoot-lost-its-way/

(paywalled, but I think it's the definitive aftermath writeup, as opposed to all the older news that stop at speculating about layoffs that had not happened yet)

It's more that big companies spend a ton of money hiring HR and developing process to ensure they regress to the mean whereas small ones can't afford or don't yet need that overhead so they don't have that force acting upon them and can go whichever way.

You cannot take a week off who will cover your responsibilities?! Lol, that kind of small company.

Often comes with 'unlimited PTO' advertised during the interview/offer process :)

The difference is that in a small company, it's the owner who is abusing you (or not). It's all down to the qualities of the person itself.

In a large company, it happens regardless of the qualities of the people involve, because it's baked into the processes. Good-natured people can mitigate it to some extent, but they cannot prevent it.

Often enough good natured people become the teflon coating for bad processes.

What does the teflon coating metaphor mean?

Teflon coating reduces friction, its a alternative lubricant for many processes

Yep. They forget there are all sorts of "families" and some are very dysfunctional.