How do short-term thinking business types infiltrate technology companies?
I feel like it’s a common script that most good companies eventually fall to short term focused management types who are happy to shred the company as long as they get their golden parachute.
Why does this seem to be the case? If you wanted to build a company that was more immune to this sort of thing how would you go about it? Examples and counter examples of these sorts of companies would be awesome to hear about.
Eh, none of the answers you’ve received so far really explain it correctly.
“VC” or venture capital is a financial instrument by which people with millions of dollars to piss away do so by funding a series of startups. These days, those startups are usually tech/sw companies but VC funds other things, too, with similar results.
When a startup is very small, it usually only needs a little bit of VC money–such a small amount that often it’s difficult to even find a VC firm interested in buying in. But once they get seed funding, they must exchange some control over their fledgling company for that cash. They hold onto and spend that cash, losing money in the process but building their product and their team and becoming a real company that has the potential for (at first) any revenue at all, and (eventually) the potential for profit.
Then they get another round–these rounds usually have letters like “A round”, “B round”, etc. At each stage, the stakeholders in the previous round either cash out or trade up to more leverage. They start to have more of a voice, and as these rounds build up, the founders usually have less of a voice. It becomes hard for the founders to tell their funders “no”, even if they retain a majority share: if they never listen to the whims of their investors, they will have more trouble attracting new ones at each successive round. This is especially true since the higher you climb the VC ladder, the fewer players there are, and the more they all talk to each other about what kind of a business you run.
The trick, of course, is if you run a customer- or employee-focused business, they will put you in the spreadsheet marked “losers” and nobody will talk to you again. They want you to run an investor-focused business, and they’ll get their way eventually.
Most startups simply collapse quickly, of course, and you hear nothing about them.
A few make it past a couple of rounds of funding before dropping out, and you would be forgiven for ignoring them.
The few that get big enough for you to hear about them, the investors are already tucking their napkins into their shirts and getting ready to dine. These companies get a few years in the limelight looking like tech darlings, and then the investors get their dinner. In many of these, the original founders simply do what the investors ask for, whether they like it or not; no need to speculate about hiring short-term thinkers, this is the original founder doing it! In some cases, the founders are forced out by the board that runs them, and somebody new is put in. We must be clear that, while the new CEO is certainly not blameless in the fall of the tech darling they’ve been given, they’re still just a pawn of VC.
How do companies become resilient to this? Don’t take VC. Fund it yourself if you can, and then whatever you say becomes the law. Sell your product for money, and use the money to run the business. Even taking a bank loan is better than VC, if your top priority is keeping control; the bank just wants their interest.
How do companies become immune to this? They can’t. Even if you are independently wealthy and seeding your company out of your own cash, even if you are the most ethical capitalist to ever fund a business, you’ll die or retire someday, and then all bets are off.
This is the fate that will befall every for-profit company.
The problem is capitalism, and it’s beyond the reach of education or regulation. There are other methods that could overturn it, of course, but not those two things.
Even if you established another economic system, though, that system too would be subject to corruption. I don’t know how a society regulates itself in such a way that economic systems never get corrupted by the desire for short-term personal gain.
Makes me wonder if a stronger system of government subsidies could replace the need for VC for some startups. The government agrees to back your expenses for X number of years until you have the means to pay back the investment, and if the startup flops in the end, the government takes the IP. If the startup is still deemed to have potential, the government continues operating the company as a state-sponsored org or folds it into a state agency to ensure the livelihoods of the startup’s employees.
End result is that startups aren’t forced into situations by VCs where they have to go public, and if they end up going under anyways by failing to pay back the government’s investment (tax payer money, basically) it is seen as a purchase of potentially valuable IP which can be made available to the public for the betterment of society and industry.
To expand on that, even if you didn’t want to take the VC funded money and bootstrap your own business, the deck is stacked against you. If you compete in the same space, a VC funded company can do more marketing, develop the product faster, have more connections to important business partners because of large amount of money and connections they have.
And they will “outcompete” you at a loss, until the bootstrapped business goes under or settles for a tiny market share in a niche. So when they say, the economy is rigged, this is what they mean. You will need large amounts of capital to compete in the tech space. Even if you are two times smarter and work two times harder, you will never be able to compete with a VC funded company flushed with money in the same space unless you get reaaaally lucky.
Incentive structure. Let’s take a simple real world example I have dealt with.
Me: look I like your software but you got to work with me on this price
Sales: well I can’t really bring it down that much
Me: hmm how about the support contract part? Looks like we get three years. If you could make it ten I could spread the cost over ten years which will make it hit my budget less hard.
Now the sales guy has a choice. Make money today and get his commission hurting the company down the line or maybe not getting the sale. Keep in mind it isn’t like the company is losing money, they are just not getting as much as they want, or at least that is what he will argue to himself.
This is a small example but I think it illustrates the point. The incentive of the individual in a company do not have to align with the company and even if they did the company today takes priority over the company a decade from now.
But in reality, it’s usually just money. Ultimately if a company has decided that it’s sole purpose for existing is maximization of wealth for it’s owners, it will inevitably tend to go to the traditional business routes and hire executives who are educated in doing exactly that.
Technology companies in particular are prime for that because everyone hopes to eventually either become the next Apple/Microsoft, or be bought out by them. It’s fast, short term and big money.
Only time in my career I was laid off was because of this. Brother owners had been running their business for 40 years very well and very employee friendly. We got lots of bonuses and pay outs based on revenues and was an awesome place to work.
one of the 3 died and so the other 2 decided it was time to retire, and they did exactly this. Went out and hired a CEO who came from a reputable business school, who has done nothing but “be an executive” since graduating, and was purely a sociopath.
within 3 years the company was a horrendous place to work for. our bonuses nearly all disapeared, or started getting pegged to arbitrary company performance standards and other bullshit. by the end of 3 years 30% of us were then let go.
All because this shmuck’s primary objective was “maximize the value of the company above all else” and for him, that meant going after the employees. Since we released ZERO product in those 3 years since he took over.
Great to hear! I guess others who are not in leadership roles would like to hear more about guys like you, and would like to know that some of you are also taking the time to teach other leaders take a different approach to work management and leadership culture.
don’t hire management externally. search loyal long time staffers who want to be promoted. don’t just promote them; make sure they want that change in their tasks.
some employers think promoting staffers to management removes a person who is good at their job, but some become fed up and bored and will leave anyway, so might as well promote them. signs are, when they ask to work in a different department/position; it means they are loyal and want to stay, but are bored/frustrated with their current tasks.
It starts with a staff shortage while scaling up, or a small project that current employees don’t have capacity for.
The execs have a decision, find and hire a long term employee(s), train them up, make sure it’s a good culture fit, and pay their benefits and compensation
or get a contractor firm to fill seats and pay the contract.
It’s all downhill from there once they pick a contracting firm.
The contracting firm is a Trojan horse for the short term philosophy, while also eroding away the skill pipeline of raising juniors to senior talent so the company eventually has to keep going back to firms.
Instead of scaling up and building the knowledge pool as the company grows organically, they want to massively scale up and down and cycle through many people and skim the good contractors off the top. But this does not work.
The bad contractors overflow the org with tech debt. Seniors don’t have juniors to train, nor do they work on the core stuff to keep their skills. The seniors and good contractors skimmed off the top turn into contractor babysitters. The juniors don’t exist. The seniors eventually turn into managers or leave for greener pastures where their original skills are wanted and respected and fostered.
Eventually the company is left a husk of past talent and mountain of tech debt, and no in-house skill to turn things around, so the options are to stay with contracting indefinitely or start at ground 0.
Combined with not increasing wages to match cost of living and inflation, not giving bonuses when there profits, and now you’ve got most of corporate America with their burnt out workforce skeleton crew.
It’s the way the system is set up to work. Nobody cares about the stock price of a public company in 10 years - rather, everyone cares about the next quarter results so they know whether they should sell or buy or whatever.
It’s the stock market that fuels this short term gain mentality. You don’t see this happen as much for private companies.
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