"The big company execs don’t realize nothing happens at a small company unless you personally take initiative. Nothing comes to you by itself."

This part hits very close to home. Every single one of the executive, sales, or biz-dev people our VCs pushed on fell into this trap. Without fail, they would dig into their network until reaching an impressive contact, put together a powerpoint proposal with shockingly good projections, and then expect someone else to make it all happen. However, in every case they were ousted by the board and the VC firm after 1 year of not producing results.