How Do We Get From Me to You?
Professional software investors who focus on A round paper (and before) know the following to be a thing that is importantly true: Transferring knowledge and perspective from the founder's head into an institutional body is "the hardest thing."
A founder is generally a subject matter expert and a founder-led sales motion can fly relying solely on that fuel source, but only for so long. The experienced investor knows that for any eventual buyer to get interested in buying, the company has to demonstrate that the sales mantel can be assumed by others and done so economically. So the question the investor dances around with the founder is, "How are you going to do this?"
The founder thinks, "I can do it and I can hire sales people and then they can do it." Usually the complexity of contemplation does not extend much beyond this. The professional software investor has learned from their own experiences that this is the case. This is where the breakdown occurs. How many times have we all thought, "This should be going better than it is"? And when we get in the right person (think the right process), things just take off — satisfying and regretful at the same time.
The biggest software companies can pretty much build anything that start-ups can; the question is, do they want to? It is not your tech they are buying when they buy your tech, it is your demonstrated ability to sell into customers that are of interest to them. This is the business you are in — account control. It takes a certain caliber of sales motion to "enable" accounts interesting to large tech companies to buy your solution and make it stick. So what is your plan for making this happen?
If you want further guidance on good hiring practices, please reach out to me at dave@moicpartners.com
