That was good. When I sold my second company as a co-founder I was made a corporate Vice President and told to grow the BU to $100m in ARR by 2013 and anything else would be a failure. There was no real beach time. Monday came and it was back to work as usual-ish. Fortunately our company retreat happened to fall between signing and closing. So we really blew it out as a team together then. It was epic. That was the stealth celebration. 20. Why do founders get fired? In my experience there are two general reasons. He or she isn’t up to the job, doesn’t realize it and take another role in the company electively. Unless the founder is delusional, this works itself out one way or another. If the founder is adding any value at all and has loyalty with the team/customers/ markets and isn’t damaging the company... then the board will want to keep him or her in some role, just one with less responsibility. In venture-backed companies I think there’s something else that leads to a lot of terminations I’ve seen, at least at the Founder CEO role. It’s being too greedy. If you push the investors too hard in particular on valuation, out of their comfort zone... they will sometimes still make the deal. Even though they shouldn’t because the valuation completely left their comfort zone. But they still do it because they just get caught up in the drama of the deal. Or it’s an ego thing, or whatever. But you pushed it too hard. If you do a deal like this, you may get a great deal but you will be resented. Just. Plain. Resented. And that means, you better hit your numbers. Every month & every quarter because you not only burned all your goodwill, you made the VC, your investor look and feel stupid. That doesn’t fade. It burns at every board meeting, with every email until you deliver an exit with $X,000,000,000 in it. Even then, it burns a bit, just less. SAASTR.COM 17