He should have fired my ass

by Giff on March 7, 2010

tugofwar

Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital today posed the question of how a startup maintains speed once it hits adolescence. His conclusion is that “speed is really the result of a having the company aligned.”

Howard Lindzon, the colorful CEO of Stocktwits, responded with the following comment:

“we deal with this today. managing feature creep is key.
obviously being aligned is good as long as you are aligned around the right path.
just a real tough question but a real belief in the model ahead is what does keep things aligned.”

Howard’s line, “obviously being aligned is good as long as you are aligned around the right path,” really hit home with me.

The last startup I was involved in, wearing various VP hats, was highly “non-lean”. It started out as a land grab on a new, fast-growing technology platform, and while we sold some incredible customers, grew revenue, and built a leadership position in our sector, about 2 years into the business we realized that the core strategy was not going to work. We needed to downsize quickly and pivot.

Downsizing was painful but necessary. We got it done and kept the ship from foundering. The real problems emerged with the need to pivot. We had been a team on a mission, backing up a CEO with a strong vision. Now, we found ourselves with a fundamental disconnect as to how the business should re-define itself, and the disconnect existed across the board-seated investors, CEO & founder, those of us at the VP-level, and across the entire organization.

What do you do when a bunch of smart, talented people simply cannot agree? When the differences aren’t incremental but fundamental?

In this case, we stuck it out for a while. We all retained the hope that we could regain the greatness of the first two years.  We believed in the talent of the team.  I personally was not ready to give up on the company after working so hard to get it off the ground. It’s not a unique startup story by any means.

But this post is about alignment.  For better or for worse, I am hard-wired to fight, and fight hard, for my beliefs. I’m open to being convinced of a better path, but nothing was convincing me in this scenario. Whether I was right or wrong back then is irrelevant. I had some good ideas and some stupid ones. What I do know, however, is that my disagreements on direction hurt organizational alignment and I went from being a force and productivity multiplier to, at times, the opposite.

We were never going to agree on direction, but with that in mind as I look back, I still puzzle over what I, and the CEO, should have done.

Putting myself in the CEO’s shoes, I probably would have fired me. He’s a very loyal guy (to a fault), and I had played a big role in building our initial success, but the world had changed and we were no longer on the same page. If he and the board had truly made up their mind on direction, I now think that they should have shed everyone not 100% in agreement. They would have lost a lot of the remaining talent, but they would have cut the cash burn way down and bought more time to see if their ideas were the right ones. (of course, the reality was more muddled and complex)

Looking back at my own shoes, I still puzzle over whether I did the right thing by sticking it out for another 18 months. Since I didn’t have control over direction, and I fundamentally disagreed with the chosen direction, perhaps I was an idiot for staying. My intuition says that yes, I should have left and started my own company much earlier. But with loyalty to colleagues, inherent stubbornness, not wanting to chalk up huge amounts of effort to “Fail”, and my wife expecting a baby, it was all rather complicated. I stayed. For the record, I don’t regret it as I grew in some useful ways.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you need people aligned. The CEO needs to make his or her best judgment as to the right path, and the board should either back that up or replace the CEO. If as CEO, you cannot get all the members of the team on the same page, you probably need to change up the team.

Yes, he should have fired my ass.

* * *

(image cropped from Tug Of War – Colour Edit, by tj.blackwell, Creative Commons)

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  • http://lmframework.com/blog/about David Semeria

    ..not wanting to chalk up huge amounts of effort to “Fail”

    Possibly the root cause for wasted efforts in many, many contexts.

    Great stuff, Giff.

  • sfrancis

    I think, however, that there's a key difference between “dissenting opinion” and misalignment. I've seen people do this “clear the decks” approach, leaving them with only “yes” men and women.

    On the other hand, you need to have a culture of discussion/debate that results in decision and action (and not too much rehashing once you've pointed the ship). If you have people on your team that can't let go of a decision already made (or where this is a pattern), then it might be time to clean house a bit. On the other hand, if you're working for someone who can't open their mind to a different (and in your opinion, correct) point of view, you might need to vote yourself off the island.

    I look at this as percentages – if you're 90% aligned or so, it probably isn't an issue. But when you're fighting upstream on everything its time to go… Just my 2 cents!

  • http://www.onceabeekeeper.com/ Kevin

    Great post, Giff. I have been in a similar situation and although I often think about the challenge in having everyone on board with a new direction and vision, I also wonder what the factors were that got things to where they are. How did your company cruise along for 2 years with success and then all of a sudden needed to pivot? What brought that reality to fruition?

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    excellent point Scott. I hate groupthink. The best cultures allow for differences in opinion and ideas, and employees feel safe bringing those up with senior management. In this case, it was more severe — the question was whether the company should focus on being a services business, with maybe a product play down the road someday, or shrink even smaller and make a go of being a product company (I wanted the latter)

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    whooo boy to answer that question would take more than a few words :) To give a nutshell of how I saw it, (and this may sound crazy to some): at the start of 2006, the company was betting on a 3D Internet emerging on top of today's 2D plane, with a bet on Second Life. We wanted to own a chunk of the application layer, ie the Netscape, eBay, Doubleclick of this new platform, and the strategy was predicated on working with large media companies to bring in consumers… by bringing the consumers in, we would get them using our applications.

    We built the software, and we signed up the media companies (and many other brands) as customers and partners, but we realized that Second Life was never going to be the mainstream platform, at least not in a time frame that could work for our company. The pivot point was watching user behavior during a huge project we did with CBS and CSI NY. The project met expectations, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to see that our hopes and reality was not going to add up. Frankly, I've gotten quite jaded about avatars and the “metaverse” but in the early days I was captivated as to how it might be a new major communications medium.

  • http://blog.ginsudo.com ginsu

    whooo boy I'd need more than a few words, and more than a few drinks, to comment on this. ;)

  • cranstone

    Sounds like he should. Being a CEO is tough, your crystal ball is sometimes no better or worse than anyone else's. What's critical though is everyone on the same page marching forward – if not, as they saying goes, sometimes you have to shot a few pirates. You understand this better if your the pirate and have been shot (I have). And now I know why alignment is so important.

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    Yeah. Well it was a complex time, and the answers were non-obvious to put it mildly. To get back to scott's point above, it is about managing that line between enabling positive disagreement and discourse which can lead you to a better path and avoid institutional blinders, versus restructuring the team to get more productive harmony.

  • cranstone

    Meritocracy vs. a democracy – one of my core values when I started my latest company was “focus and execution on a common plan”. The plan always changes as we've all learned and you can be in harmony one minute and the next minute adrift. What I've learned is that you can “right the ship so to speak” by being hard on the problem and not on the person. Validate the heck out of the course correction and usually everyone will see that the change is for the good. Validation is tough to do, and usually it's the CEO who spots when it is time for change, after he's the visionary and they see things other don't. That's why I refined the role of the CEO to “engage – explain – set and manage expectations”. The last part is the hardest, you can't be frightened of a as you said above “lack of harmony”.

    Just my 2 cents

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    I think that's often true re: CEO, but it's not uncommon to see the opposite, i.e. a CEO so convinced of a vision that everyone else sees the writing on the wall first. Our industry has seen plenty of guys with powerful reality distortion fields, but weak reality-check processes, take large teams in bad directions. Avoidance of that issue is one reason why I love lean startup concepts so much.

  • cranstone

    We're in “violent agreement”. I translate reality-check to “customer validation”.

    When we started 5o9 we spent 6 months (before we wrote a line of code) talking to prospective customers about what they wanted and what they needed. Once we had that information we refined it and then went back for even more validation. With that in hand we built the solution. We were definitely early to the market (Mobile was barely a thought 4 years ago) but now our approach is paying dividends.

    Everything we do in the company we validate – it takes a little longer but in the long term it pays off. Consequently we've spent virtually nothing to get ourselves in position for an expanding marketplace.