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As I look back on issues involving changing a CEO, I always pause and sometimes even get a chuckle.

How many times does an entrepreneur with a great idea believe they are the only one suited to run their new venture? Usually, they believe they need to be the CEO. However, even if they are the well suited to lead a venture in the beginning, they are not the one to drive to higher levels beyond development. When this expansion phase occurs, the board usually has the difficult task of letting the entrepreneur/CEO know that it is time for him to take a new role in the company.

Often this communication does not go well, and the end result is that the entrepreneur cannot understand the message and leaves the company. (more…)

In my many years of working with companies and seeing what works and what doesn’t, I have come to realize that every challenge faced by a venture funded technology company falls into one of only three buckets: (more…)

In a world where securing follow-on venture capital financing has never been more challenging, executives and boards of venture capital backed companies face difficult choices as the cash dwindles.  It is not uncommon, even in cases where fund-raising is ultimately successful, that developing companies at some point are faced with and must navigate insolvency and all that it entails. (more…)

In the traditional Silicon Valley funding model that worked for many decades, entrepreneurs came up with new ideas, pitched them to Venture Capitalists, and prayed that their idea was unique and that the VC’s found credibility in the management team in order to get funding to build the enterprise.

In the post dot-bomb era, VC’s became increasingly risk adverse, and wanted to fund only those ventures with proven entrepreneurs and only ventures that had already been fleshed out to remove much of the technology risk, leaving only a market risk to conquer.

Now, since the Great Recession, VC’s have gotten even further risk adverse, although they claim otherwise. (more…)

It goes without saying now-a-days that emerging firms do everything they can to stretch their dollar. Just about every startup that I run into informs me that they have installed a copy of QuickBooks, so the finance part of their business is “covered.” When I ask who runs QuickBooks, the inevitable answer is the “receptionist/office manager” or “I do it myself so I know things are right.”

From a dozen years of financial consulting, I have seen far too many companies go far too long without paying management attention to finance, with often fatal results. While QuickBooks is a competent system, it is not a substitute for financial management in your firm and poor input to QuickBooks will inevitably result in inaccurate output and sub-optimal decision-making. (more…)

So, your venture investors have decided to stop funding your company, and you are about to run out of cash. What are your options? There are a number of alternatives, depending on whether your company has built significant value or not. (more…)