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?
I knew a guy like this. He never had a plan for profitability but was damn good at talking and selling companies. He did it 3 separate times before 2008 and when markets dried up he started losing credibility. He took the helm at 4 different companies between 2008 and 2015, none of which reached profitability and none of the companies could be sold. He was so used to talking big until the company was acquired but he had no clue how to create a path to profitability. After 2015 he “retired” when no one else would hire him as a CEO.