I’ve been using this term a lot lately – “don’t kick the can down the road”. There is always a desire to push the hard decisions out. I find myself urging entrepreneurs and CEOs to make that hard call today and take the poison and move on. It’s hard for leaders to make this choice largely because of fear of the other things that will come along with that hard decision.
Bill Gurley, who I find myself agreeing with as much or more than anyone else in the VC business, has a fantastic post up about the danger of the “structured financings” that are increasingly common in the later stage VC market today. In it, he says:
Many Unicorn founders and CEOs have never experienced a difficult fundraising environment — they have only known success. Also, they have a strong belief that any sign of weakness (such as a down round) will have a catastrophic impact on their culture, hiring process, and ability to retain employees. Their own ego is also a factor – will a down round signal weakness? It might be hard to imagine the level of fear and anxiety that can creep into a formerly confident mind in a transitional moment like this.
This is so true. I have sat in and on countless meetings and phone calls with leaders who are afraid that the whole thing that they just spent three, four, five years (or more) building will come crashing down because they take a down round. I have been through dozens of down rounds in my career. At least thirty and maybe fifty if I really took the time to count them all. They are no different than a public company’s stock price taking a big hit. It is painful to be sure. Some people will leave but they are either weak in the knees or were half way out the door anyway. But I have never seen a down round destroy a company. And I have seen many down rounds save a company.
Another place where leaders tend to want to kick the can down the road is with talented but difficult employees. They cannot bring themselves to remove the person who is providing a ton of individual contribution but is also poisoning the culture. A founder of one of our portfolio companies once told our entire USV CEO group the following story. I am not saying who because I don’t want to expose him to any issues.
We had an engineer who was the most talented and productive engineer on our entire team. But he was also incredibly difficult to work with and everyone disliked him. We couldn’t let him go because we were fearful of creating a “hole” in our organization. Finally, the complaints got so loud that we were sure we were going to start losing people over him. So we did what we were afraid to do and let him go. And we did just fine without him. The morale of the story is you are better having a hole in your organization than an asshole.
Man I just love that one. It is so true and everyone who hears it shakes their head and chuckles and groans at the same time.
There are certainly many more examples of where leaders take the easy way out and defer a difficult decision because of fear of the consequences. My message to all of you out there is “don’t do that”. Kicking the can down the road is more harmful than helpful. Take the pain today and fix your issues and deal with the consequences. You will be better off for it and so will your company.
