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.
[1] https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936
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.
Presidential terms are four years. It seems demented to make a comparison to firing as a last resort.
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?
* Referencing Fred’s own post/replies on twitter https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1320706427091111936?s=...
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
CEO has failed to manage numerous important challenges... Why is the VC is fixated on X/Y/Z when I'm trying to corner a bigger piece of an expanding pie? The VC believed in my vision when they invested and are now micromanaging me as soon as I hit a couple speed bumps.
Senior leadership team has been a revolving door...Senior leadership is typically installed by the board majority holding VC. What happened to all the sweat equity built when this startup concept and industry was very uncertain and the company went from default: "dead" to default: "alive". All these MBA grads want is to slow down growth and clutter up the site with a ton of garbage ads.
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.
Could you imagine dealing with egotistical (but correct) 20-something Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg making you gorge down humble pie as a white haired well credentialed VC? Would FAANGM be recognizable today if the founders got booted early and replaced with a highly credentialed buddy of the VC?
It is the board's responsibility to hire and fire executive management and as both a significant shareholder and board member, has the leverage to do so IF the other board members agree. It is almost never unilateral. Now - in the early-ish days of a company (say,pre-D series), the board is pretty small and pretty acquainted, so the guy who wants to fire you (the CEO) just places about 4 phone calls, and if everyone is on board, gets the ball rolling. Legally, it is a lot easier than it is with a public company or with someone with one of those weird split-stock-right things like Facebook.
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?
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
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.
"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?
Someone's neural network is biased.
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.
