“Why is Bob with the company?” I asked myself. “He just seems to sit in the corner doing nothing.”
Bob was the founder of the startup I had just joined as VP Marketing. Bob was no longer the CEO, but, for some strange reason, he was still with the company, doing what looked to be nothing.
As I spent more time at the company I came to realize that Bob had no real responsibilities. It just made no sense to me why was Bob still at the company.
But Bob did have one thing going for him. Bob was the technical genius behind the company, and investors are loath to fire the technical genius.
About two months later, Jack, the CEO, was fired by the board. The board hired a new CEO, Dave. And yet, Bob remained at the company, still without any real responsibilities.
The crazy thing was the company had a VP Engineering and the company had a CTO. The company didn’t need Bob anymore.
Sometimes a founder is kept at a company because the investors view the founder as a safety net.
Bob was the proverbial security blanket for the investors. If everything went wrong technically, then, in their eyes, Bob could pick up the pieces.
The problem was that the company’s problems weren’t the technology, but the business side of the equation. That was part of the reason I was brought in.
I started digging into the company’s business. The more I dug, the more concerned I got.
We were focused on the telecom market, and the company was doing business with all the major telecom suppliers of the day. That was the good news. The bad news was that Cisco and the other customers were only using the company’s product for prototyping, not for production.
It was a house of cards that was ready to fall. The board came to the same conclusion at the same time I did, so they fired the CEO, Jack.
