I work for an entertainment software startup, and I’ve watched for five years as my CEO has focused the company on creating demos to get investment, and short term deals with large companies using what we have. This has resulted in burnout, attrition, and massive tech debt.
There is a time and place for this, but five years in, we haven’t invested our resources in making an MVP we can build a customer base on. The board is finally asking that we have a revenue plan, but in a recent conversation, the CEO told me he has no plans to make money over the next year or attempt to scale users. His vision is high level, without details on strategy. At this point, the CTO and head a product are pretty much in my corner, sharing my concerns.
I don’t want to just assume he’s an idiot. He’s a gifted talker, but there’s a kind of reality distortion at play that I just don’t get. It’s like he’s ignorant to how software development works, yet is the CEO of a software company. Maybe he just hopes we’ll be purchased.
Point is, how can I help right this ship as a non-founder, but senior level early employee? What should I be empathetic to? What’s a sign that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing?
well, one thing you can try and do, is to point out that no large mutli-national with thousands of staff is going to integrate a core-tech that will affect their millions of dollars of revenue and give that over to an untested, unverified prototype from a new startup, even the corporate insurance wouldn’t cover them if it went wrong, and those are the kind of errors that would result in ppl on your client side getting fired. (i’m being melodramatic)
the point is, most large companies with multi-levels of leadership dont want to take risks on prototypes, they want something working perfect with zero errors on day one. don’t get me started on the procurement process and the payment process which is already enough to kill a business with 3 months of runway left (not suggesting thats your situation)