Monthly Archives: February 2017

Carl cashing in his chips

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Here’s an interesting Carl Bass exit interview with Roopinder Tara at engineering.com. If you’re wondering just how much stock Carl offloaded in those planned sales, here are his reported sales of Autodesk stock in the weeks leading up to the resignation:

  • 11 Jan 2017 $7,894,150
  • 9 Jan 2017 $7,888,768
  • 5 Jan 2017 $7,694,038
  • 23 Dec 2016 $1,971,715
  • 22 Dec 2016 $1,968,935

That’s $27m, give or take. Carl’s reported as having sold over $49m of Autodesk stock over the last three years.

While Carl still has tens of millions of Autodesk stock, dumping that much of it before leaving doesn’t strike me as the actions of someone as supremely confident in the future of Autodesk’s ailing cloud push and rent-or-go-away business model as his words would suggest.

Here, have some fun by voting in these polls. Idea shamelessly stolen from Paul Munford on Twitter.

Who do you want to be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (18%, 32 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (12%, 21 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (7%, 13 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 4 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 8 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (28%, 50 Votes)
  • Other outsider (27%, 48 Votes)

Total Voters: 176

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Who do you think will be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (41%, 53 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (8%, 11 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 2 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 7 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Other outsider (22%, 29 Votes)

Total Voters: 130

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Carl Bass resigns

1 Reply

I only met Carl Bass once, and that was when I gatecrashed his party in 2006. Seemed like a nice guy. Didn’t kick me out.

So now one of the worst-kept secrets in the CAD industry, Carl Bass’s impending departure from Autodesk, has now come to pass.


At the Bricsys Conference in Munich last October, industry observers and Carl’s former colleagues were all aware Carl’s departure was looming. They were pondering only the timing of the announcement and the identity of his replacement; we now know one of those things. The wisdom (not the accuracy) of this sort of Trump-baiting by a major public company’s CEO was questioned, but I guess if you know you’re on the way out you can say what the heck you like:


Carl has worked hard in this industry for decades and set himself up very nicely for his retirement with a large bucketload of cash and his own little hobby factory. Good luck to him; I wish him many happy years tinkering and making things.

What happens next is vitally important to Autodesk and its customers. More on that later.