It sounds like the failings of the product CEO can be fixed with just a good COO. E.g., the OP has: > Then somewhere along the line, employees start complain

It sounds like the failings of the product CEO can be fixed with just a good COO. E.g., the OP has: > Then somewhere along the line, employees start complaining that the CEO is paying too much attention to what the employees can do better without her and not enough attention to the rest of the company. Sounds like the CEO needs a good COO for "the rest of the company". Okay. It does appear that VCs commonly miss this point. Maybe someone could guess why, with three guesses, where the first two don't count. For a 101 level lesson on deception, watch, say, Star Wars III -- that lesson is in the movie because audiences are prepared to believe that it is close enough to reality, and many in the audience have good reason to so believe. Deception, etc., go way back, at least to Shakespeare. Don't fall for it. In the OP, the recommended solution for the product CEO is to write down the vision or whatever for the product. Good. But now we are on the way back to the most rigid version of waterfall development -- documents mostly in advance for each level of the work. I tend to believe that those documents, etc. are a good, maybe nearly essential, approach for the scenario in the OP, but that approach is the polar opposite of lean and agile development. For small projects, sure, lean and agile are okay -- knock out some code, see if like it, else change it, rinse and repeat. But for significant projects, I never liked lean or agile anyway! But, let's see: The product CEO is to communicate only via a carefully prepared, written document and does prepare one or more such documents. So, now the VCs can think what that they couldn't before? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. There is: > The CEO skill set is incredibly difficult to master, Hmm ... So, how did Gates, Ellison, Page, Zuck do it? Did they have years of experience managing people, from a lemonade stand to the decorations for the homecoming dance to the college PBK awards dinner to a division in the US Army, to salesman, local sales manager, district sales manager, chief marketing officer? Nope -- none of those. What about guys in the flyover states who build businesses big enough to let them have, say, a 60 foot yacht? But, still we're talking something "incredibly difficult"? IMHO the whole OP is to make excuses for what VCs still very much like to do -- have the CEO their puppet on their strings and, then, pull the strings to get what they believe they want where firing the founding CEO is to be expected. Such firing by VCs used to be expected, and now we see that with A16Z it is again. Besides, this stuff about how much A16Z likes product CEOs looks like just misdirection to keep from talking about what A16Z really cares about: A company with traction significantly large and growing rapidly in a huge market but where the founders need/want cash and are still willing to sign a standard term sheet that has the founders suddenly go from owning 100% of the company to owning 0% and a four year vesting plan to get back some of the ownership while the BoD can fire them before their stock is vested and, really, makes the VCs' investments more valuable -- it's the VC's fiduciary responsibility to their limited partners. What is a founder to believe about a VC? What's in a blog post or what's in a term sheet and the other documents, maybe two inches thick, worked out very carefully by bright, well paid lawyers? Instead, (A) plan the project so that get to positive free cash flow early on, (B) grow just organically, that is, from retained earnings, and (C) plan the project so that have some good barriers to entry to keep out competition long enough for the growth. Guys, it looks like A16Z just wants your work, ownership, and company and wants to get those by having you sign an onerous term sheet while they give you some excuses about why you should give up your power as CEO and, thus, really, all or a lot of the financial benefit of your work. They are after the founder's money, guys.