In those kinds of situations, I think companies can create custom bundles where they can keep control and can even sell common stock—which is the ultimate hack. They can make sure they don’t give up board seats, they don’t give up vetoes on M&A and option pool issuances and future fundraising.

We used to have a saying at Venture Hacks: “Valuation is temporary. Control is forever.” Whoever has control can effectively end up controlling your valuation later. Never give up control.

If you’re a very sales-oriented founder, then you might get somebody to augment on the product side. If you’re a very product-oriented founder, you might get somebody to augment on the sales side. If you’re a very sales- and product-oriented founder, you might get somebody to augment you on the pure operational infrastructure side. There are so man

Once your company hits a certain scale, you should start meeting with the CEOs of companies you may want to buy every quarter or two. This relationship-building may eventually pay off in a competitive strategic situation. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook was notoriously focused on building relationships with the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram, leadi

If the CEO disconnects from the product, that’s usually bad. And that is something that you see happen to varying degrees as a company scales. There are a lot of CEOs that say, “Well, I want to just go think about strategy all the time. I’m really tired of managing people.” Because managing people is hard. And so a lot of CEOs have tried a structur

The other thing we see companies really struggle with is new managers, or inexperienced managers. A lot of people in early-stage companies haven’t managed other people before, or don’t have a lot of experience doing that. So they’re just not great at doing basic manager things, like giving feedback. And giving good feedback, feedback about the proc

There are a lot of reasons why diversity matters, and it’s important for every company that’s going to invest in this—invest time, invest resources, invest energy—to have a reason that’s specific to them. The first reason is that there is a lot of research showing diverse teams are stronger when it comes to analytical thinking and complex problem-s

By the time a given company is worth $1 billion or more, the CEO and board should start to think of M&A as a serious tool for accelerating the company’s progress and valuation. For example, at $1 billion market cap, a $10 million acquisition is just 1% of your startup’s equity. If the acquisition can increase your valuation by just 10%, then it

The hard part is that most people want to just do the first part, which is figure out what the company should do. In practice, time-wise, I think the job is 5% that and 95% making sure that it happens. And the annoying thing to many CEOs is that the way you make it happen is incredibly repetitive. It’s a lot of the same conversation again and again