Email to Former Board Member
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
I don't judge (actually I feel for this guy), but let's be honest: isn't it? And this email just reinforces the idea. In fact, as all this stuff I've just read settles in my mind, empathy starts to give place to the feeling all of this is kind of... petty?
"Simultaneously, we were forced to deal with a board member who was beyond counterproductive. After we bought him out fully in 2019, I sent this feedback email detailing the ways in which he had disrupted our board and company. Dealing with this issue was one of the loneliest times I faced as a CEO. To be clear, this email is unlike anything I’ve sent in my life, and I’ve thought long and hard about the decision to share it. I’m not doing so to disparage the individual in question; the only objective is to help others who might find themselves in a similar situation. (Nothing has been removed, including typos, from the email except for names.)"
That doesn't sound healthy to me.
I’d expect this from some middle manager at a university.
Does anyone work in M&A? What in your experience is a sufficient timetable for diligence and discovery? I ask working for a company that "grows by acquisition", and being in a middle management role I find myself often playing clean-up crew to some alarming things that should have been caught during diligence, but am growing increasingly weary being told "we didn't have time".
This is no attempt at malingering my duties, but I've lost one staff member already to the burnout from this, and am quite fearful I'm about to lose another. Both have told me "it's not you, you've been a great manager" yet both have lamented feeling like their jobs have turned into playing the 'janitor' role for messy acquisitions saying "you did what you could"
My own complaints up the food-chain have been returned with shrugs by a director who seems equally powerless in a process that is burning people out--and I'm considering looking for the door at the end of the year from it.
(I know a company that's in that position right now, and there's no visible planning for 2021.)
I have this impression as well, detaching a bit and looking at 'everything' (or as much as my perch will allow).
To say it's frustrating would be an understatement; I considered applying to a role and effectively taking a demotion and being an IC again. Which, if it says anything--is something my last two predecessors did as well.
Otherwise you've hit every nail on the head and quite well summed up my feeling of 'limbo'.
[EDIT: I was wrong, yesterday the person publicly acknowledged it's him.]
JFC, the guy who told him to commit suicide tries to act like he's the victim and defends himself by claiming he was just part of the mob, and didn't know who he was telling to kill themself. Nice to know he thinks it's fine to urge strangers to commit suicide.
On further reading they used to do something (a marketplace to connect investors and consumer companies needing funding) but they pivoted into being a plain old investment company (ie what the founders used to do themselves).
They make some very dubious claims about using machine learning, what huge dataset are they pulling from when the pool of companies is tiny and their marketplace doesn’t exist anymore?
How is a VC meant to get VC returns from a company that is itself simply raising money and investing it in early stage companies.
This feels like clever self marketing (tech founder vs financiers!) when really it’s a pissing match between VCs