

Post Series A Life - dmor
https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/working-with-brad-4f79d8859443

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ChuckMcM
I think it is a good habit to avoid the 'because the board says ...' prompt
for decisions. It is a very seductive short cut but it also keeps the other
folks out of touch with the trade-offs. In an early startup I was in, I got to
see how it affected people (it makes them feel like they are robots or serfs).

The truth is, if you know that the board said to do something, you were also
there at the conversation about it, and in that conversation are important
bits about tradeoffs and how things were considered. Telling someone "After
considering X, Y, and Z, the board and I decided that Q was going to be our
best course of action."

I have also seen it used as a shield, as in "the board said we have to do
this" which the implication that the person making the request (typically the
CEO) didn't agree with the request but was overridden. But the truth is that
in a start-up, and even in a larger company, the board is often unwilling to
override a CEO's solution to a problem, in favor of one of their own. Good
board members respect that the CEO's day to day vision of what is going on
carries a lot of weight.

~~~
sliverstorm
I've never been the one passing down board decisions- how often is it used as
a shield purely as strategy? What I mean is, the CEO (or whomever) secretly
agrees with the board but wants/needs to appear to the employees like they
fought the board and disagree?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sadly, in my experience it has been a common technique used by poor managers
to enact a distasteful policy by blaming it on some higher authority. And that
it can be a culture thing, which is their manager does it, and their manager's
manager does it, and the CEO does it.

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AndrewKemendo
_set a maximum monthly burn rate of $400K_

Wow. That means Mattermark has 25 employees at the absolute minimum.

From what I can tell [1] Mattermark is a private angelist with better metrics
for VC's and Super Angels. That's not really that hard of a problem. In other
words, they probably aren't doing/implementing basic research towards a
product solution. That's not to say it's easy to build the business, it just
means they don't need to build or prove new technology - which would seem to
drive costs/employees.

I am fairly new to the Startup world (only ~3 years) so I still don't really
understand why fairly simple problems, using off the shelf pieces, need so
many people working on them. Someone please help me understand this. Is it all
customer service? Is it having redundancy so that people can work 30 hour
weeks?

[1][http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/aiming-to-be-
a-b2b-google-f...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/aiming-to-be-a-b2b-google-
for-business-intel-mattermark-raises-6-5m-led-by-foundry-group/)

~~~
nugget
I used to think like you, before I experienced the inner machinations of tech
m&a.

Somewhere out there are a handful of big companies who sell billions of
dollars worth of collective research data. I don't know the market but maybe
these are companies like Bloomberg, Gartner, etc. one day an exec at one of
these companies will want to add startup research (or whatever MM's product
is) to their product suite. They will evaluate the cost of building it
internally versus buying someone like MM. Keeping in mind that if you build
internally, it takes time (maybe a year to replicate), and has significant
failure risks. So they do the math and all of a sudden $100m to acquire MM
makes sense. Keeping in mind it isn't the exec's $100m and that spending $15m
and failing looks a lot worse than spending $100m and doing OK.

MM's job is to keep growing/pivoting until one of these big fish bite. If no
one bites, they have to hope they end up with a lot of independent value.

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mwetzler
Brad, if you ever want to come hang out in our slack channels, we'd love to
have you over here at Keen IO :)

Nice piece Danielle. Jealous!

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sm0ckr
I'm not usually a stickler for grammar/usage but this title needs some
hyphens!

~~~
gargarplex
It only needs one hyphen. "Post-Series A Life" is the appropriate and correct
hyphenation.

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raheemm
Great list of working docs. Congrats Danielle & team.

