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Removing the CEO
- tehjoker 6y agoBoards hesitate to remove CEOs but CEOs don't hesitate to remove employees. Elite culture requires social niceties and soft treatment while everyone else gets scored, disciplined, and underpaid.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoIt sucks but to interface with elite culture and get them to give you money, it helps to have members of that culture as your leadership. Otherwise the non-elite wouldn't even have jobs (which are not needed so badly by the elite).
- tehjoker 6y agoThis is why I advocate for seizing the means of production.
- nigelgutzmann 6y agoThe language in the post doesn't seem too soft. My reading of it is a pretty blunt enumeration of failures on the part of the CEO.
- tehjoker 6y agoI am not a media person, a board member of a major company, nor an executive. I am a socialist, so I find it simple to express the sentiment of class war that is so anathema to the elite classes that partake in it constantly against the lower classes.
- ska 6y agoVery few individual employee firings will have broad impact on the company the same way a CEO firing will. The whole process is disruptive by nature, so a board needs to be sure. This isn't just "elite culture", although there is probably some of that in many scenarios. edit: responding to a couple of comments - yes this is a feature of how we choose to structure these companies, it is not unavoidable. However, given the distribution of decision making and responsibility in a typical American corporate structure, removing the CEO is inherently difficult. One can imagine situations where it is less disruptive, but those companies would look and operate quite differently.
- postalrat 6y agoIt's disruptive by design. Does it need to be that way?
- tehjoker 6y agoCultural practices exist for a variety of reasons. This is one of them. The people in the ownership class need each other for various reasons because they have control over substantial resources than can disrupt the plans of other members. For lower level employees, their only strength is numbers and unless they realize this they can be treated much worse for arbitrary reasons.
- tikkabhuna 6y agoMy immediate thought is that this is due to visibility. You can churn through the lowest level positions for a while before questions are asked, but you can't do that for CEOs. Its also the case for other prominent positions. If someone with a big following joins and then leaves very quickly someone will comment on it and if its big enough an article will be written. No company wants to be noticed for people leaving, but they'll make a big song and dance when big wig from X company moves to them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- angrydev 6y agoI wonder who this is about
- jyu 6y agoThe article suggests that the VC is in an infallible position and the CEO maybe the one who is failing at his job. A common trope is founders getting fired, stepping aside for some socially acceptable reason, which brings their fantastic journey to an end. Here's a fun thought exercise: When is the VC the problem and not the founders? How do you even go about firing a VC? Have you ever read VC's "fantastic journey" blog post?
- Macha 6y agoThe VC is rarely as visible to customers/partners as the CEO which means that they can quietly sell off their holdings (I've heard of cases on HN where it goes to the founder for a "just take this off our portfolio" price when it's clear it's shaping up to be a lifestyle business) and don't need to publicly provide a introduction to the new face or reassurances about the business the way an outgoing CEO does.
- setgree 6y agoYes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793170 goes into great detail about removing a problem person from the board. (From the CEO of CircleUp.)
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoMay be
- Benjammer 6y ago>The article suggests that the VC is in an infallible position I'm not sure where you get this angle from? I read it as several points of evidence that the author uses to identify a bad CEO, that don't seem to have much to do with the VC at all, let alone comparing the VC as superior in any way against the CEO directly. From the article: >the CEO has failed to manage numerous important challenges, when the senior leadership team has been a revolving door, when the CEO has messed up important relationships with customers, employees, and other important stakeholders, when the organization has become toxic as a result of the CEO’s abrasive personality
- fractionalhare 6y agoIs the timing of this post meaningful? Could it be pointing at someone in particular?
- jonny_eh 6y agoTrump
- fractionalhare 6y agoOh...wow I thinking maybe a tech CEO. I totally missed the political angle then.
- demarq 6y agoThis is like those social media status updates after someone is heart broken. "You give your heart to someone and they break it" we are all now supposed to figure out there has been a falling out of some sort, with some CEO somewhere. who is he? what did he do?
- ponker 6y agoI’m sure Wilson has fired gobs of CEOs in his career. Probably happens to at least 1 of 10 VC funded startups.
- kordlessagain 6y ago> who is he? what did he do? Someone's neural network is biased.
- demarq 6y agoto have seen that bias, surely requires ...another bias
- js2 6y agoLet’s not beat around the bush. This is about the Nov 3rd election. Here’s a couple posts on firing that were not written with the election in mind: https://a16z.com/2017/05/24/on-firing-why-when-how/ https://a16z.com/2017/05/24/on-firing-why-when-how/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/24/preparing-to-fire-an-executive/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/24/preparing-to-fire-an-executive/
- joshmanders 6y agoHow do you gather this is from the Nov 3rd election? Sure you can replace "The CEO" and "The Company" with "The President" and "The Country" but I don't see how you got that correlation.
- itsoktocry 6y ago>How do you gather this is from the Nov 3rd election? If it isn't about the election, then it's SV fluff. "It's hard to fire a CEO, but it must be done sometimes" isn't terribly insightful stuff.
- mmastrac 6y agoFrom Twitter: "Our national decision that is upon us" [1] [1] https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936 https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936
- BryanBeshore 6y agoF. Wilson’s reply to a thread on his Twitter indicates as such: https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936?s=21 https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936?s=...
- tschwimmer 6y agoHm, yeah. I would not have guessed that this post was a reference to the election by the text alone, but that tweet certainly seems to indicate that it is.
- aaisola 6y agoIt would interesting to see some data on CEOs that were fired, at what stage and the eventual outcome for the company. My guess is that firing a founder-CEO before the Series B stage rarely leads to a positive long-term outcome.
- vladmk 6y agoGreat thought here and agree, more data would be interesting
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago> It is an even harder decision to make when you don’t have an obvious replacement, or when you are not 100% confident that the obvious replacement will be an improvement over the current CEO. When the stakes are high and the cost of keeping current leadership are potentially harmful to a dangerous degree and the only possible replacement isn't an obvious choice (as is the case with the obvious allusion to the US presidency) then this is true. In reality, do VCs really go so far as to make the call to replace someone with someone else who has the potential to be equally bad? Isn't the risk of two consecutively bad CEOs worse than taking a little longer to find a reasonable replacement?
- ci5er 6y agoYes. I don't know how regular it is, but Austin Ventures used to regularly kill founder CEOs after Series B (maybe (probably?) correctly), but replace them from a bunch of bench-players (we used to call them "the Boys Club". They would generally wreck the company, but AV played enough shell games that they, the LPs and their friends always made out OK. EDIT: They (AV) have more recently (not super-recently) moved into mostly PE, and the incubator seems to be gone (?), but given the VC penchant to syndicate, and AV's penchant to not be nice to work with, even as the big-fish in a small pond, the number of people at places like Interwest or Sevin Rosen to work with them (Central Texas VC types), maybe they felt constrained? Or maybe they shot enough entrepreneurs in the back? Their 5-year-ago-fund was big enough to qualify for PE activity - maybe their new-new partners (the old ones retired about that time) decided they would prefer to apply their Wharton MBA skills/talents to PE? IDK.
- ci5er 6y agoBy Gawd - I certainly don't mind being down-voted, but since this is not Reddit, would people give the courtesy of telling me what they disagree with? Is that too much to ask?
- ci5er 6y agoGreat question, that I am going to answer badly, based on my environment. AV (Austin Ventures) was always known as the big fish in the little pond, ever since I moved here from Japan - and I guess that isn't wrong, but they seemed to have moved onto their version of PE. But one thing that always irritated me and my "executive" friends was how much they liked to put somebody on their back-bench into your job. If it's the right choice - nice. If it happens once-or-twice - nice. But If they do it 9 months after every Series A every time, it starts to make a (n aware) founder wary). I generally don't think founders should be CEOs. Certainly as a founder I should not have been But that doesn't mean youo bring out the brick-bat. It means that you sit down and say something: "Don't you think we should hire the new CEO together and figure our your ongoing role in the company (esp. since you still own 60%)?). I don't know - I just found them heavy handed. I don't know that I ever hit at them hard or that they hit at me hard, but I do know that they came in hard and triggered a hard response. At this point, I don't think they like me much (which is sad, because I was just getting to like them), but there are a lot of personal relationships (apparently) in this business