It’s that day. It is the company meeting where the CEO and management team stand up before you, the valuable employees, and announce they have closed a new equity round, perhaps round D, E, F or G. Here are the comments from your management and the VC, followed by the translation: CEO: “We are really […]
Your CEO Announces “We Got Funded”–TRANSLATION Provided Read More »
At the SXSW conference, we had dinner with the management team for a 7-year-old cloud company that believes it has now found its way. After 5 failed sales VPs, they are off to the races and know they are going to be massively successful. Until the 6th sales VP encounters the “inherent contradiction.” Our
5 Sales VPs Later, Do You Understand Inherent Contradiction? Read More »
Wow mom! I just joined a startup and they are giving me 10,000 stock options. Everyone seems to know somebody who works for a tech company and has stock options. And likely everyone knows someone who experienced a “liquidity event” and those 10,000 options did not buy lunch. Why? Stock options are one of the
Employee Stock Options—The Last Legal Way to Screw Your Talent Read More »
Startup tech companies need money. Money is a commodity. Like any commodity, it has a price. The price of money from a venture capital firm is the highest possible price, with many lurking problems. VC money often results in the total dilution of employees, early investors and founders so they get little, often nothing
Once I was the victim of VC financing and the forced steroids it injected into my company. We had just delivered the Ebay fraud engine and were fast to becoming the standard for some very interesting fraud detection. We vaulted from almost bankruptcy to over $100 million in valuation. Our VCs wanted us to take
I Fired 35 People And It Changed My Life—-For the Better Read More »
Raw, early stage startups often watch way too much TV and see shows like Startup.com and others where there is some kind of achievement when they get a “funding event.” Well, what they do not see is it is more accurately called a dilution event. VCs are not the friends of the raw startup.