Start Up Goldilocks

Unicorns: A Cautionary Tale

Recently, I was brought in to consult a venture capital fund as they interviewed an acquisition target. (Fun project! Help total strangers decide to avoid or create a massive wealth event for other total strangers, all while never leaving your home. I've had worse times, honestly.)

This mostly consisted of spending time in remote meetings, asking questions about the offering when pertinent, and taking a lot of notes to share with the VC later.

It was an interesting project, and the agency that hired me was pleased with my work... but that's not the point of the story. (Also, I'm not going to disclose the outcome of the decision, because confidentiality and the such.)

 Without getting into the details of what was discussed and decided, what the most striking point to me about the entire experience was how similar the prognosis for the target company was to other companies that I've known.

To wit: you can try to change the world and create amazing value for your clients with something new and exciting and game-changing...

But if what you are doing is really all that and a bag of chips, and the market shows it with explosive growth and revenue...

Well, why wouldn't a whale (i.e., Google, Amazon, Adobe, or maybe their Chinese competitors) just swim on in, buy your company or similar tech, and just be done with the category?

And if that has not happened... well, is your category or technology really all that, and if the answer is no, then why should the VC be around to put more cash into something that isn't going to change the world and cash out?

It all puts you in a Goldilocks moment -- markets that are neither too big nor too small, but *just* right -- and, well, having your start up win is hard enough without adding extra hoops to jump through.

I know, I know -- I'm missing the point of Start Up, which is when your stock option lottery tickets cash out and you get enough moolah to afford real estate in any market, all while setting yourself up to either continue working with the whale (unlikely) or buy yourself a lot of runway to take off with another plane.

But on some level, well, having a steady gig is its own reward, and companies that keep their people tend to do things like keep communities together. Kind of useful things, those.

So, maybe I'm just old fashioned here... but how about we just have companies that turn a profit as soon as humanly possible, and reduce their need for outside capital in the first place?

Pitch Drunk

In my free-lance and consulting life, I get to hear and deliver more sales and marketing pitches in a year than most people see in a lifetime. I'm also enough of an "In The Weeds" nerd to never, ever consider the following game. Nope, not ever. 

You Are What You Is

It's a way to learn French

(H/t to Frank Zappa, and a song  that you really can't quote in its entirety any more...)

In the past few months, I have taken on some bigger clients in consulting agreements, as part of a larger consortium. This has been very productive and even reasonably lucrative, and while I do not think that I am going to avoid full-time work for the rest of my career, the work has been interesting and I have learned a lot. I also definitely have added some things to my skill set.

What is even more intriguing about these experiences is how they inform past professional stops. Especially when you get a fresh perspective.

This is because when you are at a start up, it can be completely immersing in ways that warp your view. If your management communicates change every quarter - not unusual in a hot sector - you can definitely feel that things are different now than what they were before, and that the rest of your industry is either responding to your change, or soon will. You eat your own dog food, become a fan of the product as well as the people, and move with the times.

However, if your sales pitch is ineffective and you have whale clients that dictate the terms of your road map, you run the risk of being left out to dry on an initiative that is not really supported by reality.

The reason why is that just because the product changes or you are hearing new things in meetings and hallways, that does not mean the management, or the perspective that they bring to the problem, has truly become very different. Start-up culture in particular has a very high count of people who need to be the smartest people in the room, and if that translates to also feeling like you are smarter than your clients and know what they really should be doing...

Well, that mindset may be more meaningful than what is said in the pitch. That perspective can be very helpful for the people you talk to at your next engagement.

So if you are doing your due diligence on a start up, see if you can find an old deck. Talk to anyone in your network who they ran into a while ago. Go on the specialty sites and see the turnover rates, and how much their advertising copy has changed over the years. Find out if the benefits and offers are wildly different, and if their clients seem to have taken over the wheel and driven their development.

If all of this is true, you do not have to avoid working with that company. Especially if they are upfront about it. It may not even be a red flag that pitch and execution are going to be wildly different.

But if you are doing a deal with someone, you owe it your client and company to do the due diligence. Because when people show you what they are, you should believe them... but you may need to dig a little to find a true look.