Comment by jVinc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jVinc | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a lot like the "CEO" is a just sales rep for your company who did a great sales pitch to get you into YC, but who didn't even commit enough to the company to want to do it fulltime unless the person could get majority ownership.

As others have mentioned, you might want to try to pull the business out of the company and get a better sales rep, with a more appropriate single digit or less equity.

This kind of ego trip happens all the time in companies, when a sales rep closes a deal for X$ and they believe they just made the company X$ profit, fully ignoring not just all costs, but also every single contribution from everyone else at the company that put them in a position to even try to sell whatever was pitched, and everything that will be needed to deliver it.

That's perfectly fine mentality for a sales rep, but no for a CEO. Which seems obvious.

My experiences with Sales in the driver's seat have been pretty bad.

One Sales exec thought it was hilarious to petulantly insist that our products be "zero cost, perfect, and shipping yesterday", dismissing out of hand small stuff like iron triangle, budgets, P&L, schedules, etc.

Another Sales exec, troubled by our excessive salaries (read: below market), denigrated our dev and ops teams by saying "All y'all do is type on the computer all day. How hard could that be?"

Etc.

(I don't know that engineering lead orgs are any better, overall. I've yet to experience the mythical balanced combo Sales, Engineering, and Support org.)

Yeah, it can really seem like "We closed a x-million dollar contract, we nailed it." But when you really take a step back, anybody can sell an x-million dollar contract. (reducto-ad-absurdem: I can find somebody tomorrow who would a ton of gold for 1-million dollars). The question to the salesman/ceo is --- did you sell a promise that can realistically and cheaply be made and maintained for under the sales price? If not, a huge sale may ultimately be a net negative.

This isn't just some philosophical thing, I've worked at tons of places that have gone out doing ridiculous partnership attempts (e.g. an Italian telecom company) based on this misunderstanding.

This is very true. We had a $1m/year customer that dragged us down. I went over the development costs that were exclusive to that client. It was not worth the money. We were developing custom features. They since had to dump a lot of their locations which were picked up by another of our clients but maintained the entitlement.

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