It all starts so well, swimmingly in fact, you as the young Founder/CEO blazing a trail with the latest technology making a major impact in the market. So you have a founding team, perhaps with engineering, operational and financial skills to match and balance your business and marketing bias. Seed capital provided by a couple of names in the industry that have helped not just with the money but really opening up the network. They in turn after some key wins have introduced you to a particular venture capital company and you have closed an A round giving you the rocket fuel to enter the US market.
You have filled out the board room, one of the private investors, a representative from the VC, a Chairman like figure that the VC recommended with long experience of your sector, an experienced VP of sales from one of the established brands, and of course your co-founders. The board meetings are purposeful and you are learning lots of new stuff, even more so at the dinners and lunches that follow as you bond with the board members. So it all feels good, they are great support, you can ring them up any time to pick their brains and of course they are beginning to learn a great deal more about you, your ambitions and capabilities.
You are running flat-out managing the team and company during the day, catching up with the administration and contract detail in the early evening and hitting the event circuit for product exposure later on. This gives you little time to gain a perspective on where you really are, how committed people are internally and what conversations are going on about your company elsewhere that you are not directly involved in. As Andy Grove at Intel said “Only the Paranoid survive” well he was talking about a bunch of things to do with change, but it is a good line to focus on. At some point come hell or high water things will change and you better be ready for them.
What you have to understand is that you as Founder/CEO are on your own, despite the appearance that you have all these people around you that are seemingly becoming friends. In business you have acquaintances, fellow board members, maybe colleagues, but let me assure you no real friends. The reason being people in this particular adventure have vested interests, keeping their jobs, supporting their families, growing the share options, enhancing their shares, flattering their reputations and most of all limiting risk. Now that might come as a shock, you have started a company with these people, won the early deals together, travelled in economy together, built event stands to the wee small hours together and shared many a dinner and drinking session.
But when the day dawns when the company hits a major blip and it will, the pressure will build and when it does, strangely you will find that the buck stops right at your door. So what is the point I am making here, why am I in some way stating the blooming obvious, yes you are in charge. It is easy to lose sight of it, that’s why, you have all these players around you, a buzz of interplay going on. An adrenalin pumping speed of movement, which makes the silence that accompanies you at last when on your own at midnight, wondering what happened, wrecking your brain for the solutions, even more deafening.
Even if they all in the end do turn out to be great people and continue to support, just be ahead of all of this, be prepared, build your own trusted support team and be slightly cynical throughout …. Just in case.
Mentor & Board Advisor 