Mentor/Mentee Case Study Part V
It’s been a while since I wrote in this series so let’s see where we left off. My mentee had just brought a sweet buyout offer into his last startup he was working for from a major unicorn (Yahoo) and the three stooges that founded the company at a Startup Weekend less than two years before and was running out of seed capital very fast due to a fairly high burn rate as I stated in part IV and the CEO who was far less experinced and qualified than my mentee (CFO) was sweating him to turn in daily call sheets with the names and contact information of all his investors he had pitched like some entry level intern or something. Anyway, long story short, they passed on the 11 million buyout offer my guy brought in from the unicorn (Yahoo) and took the 3 million VC money my guy brought in and they canned him over his lack of turning in daily call sheets just short of his shares vesting and the CEO took full credit for the VC money in the press. I just shook my head and told him to sue the little pricks but my guy is very non-litigious, doesn’t like attention in any way and just said he’d leave it to karma and move forward. This is where he and I really differ. I think I came out of the womb as a big mouth, fast talkin self promoter and I can’t get my mentee to even update his LinkedIn profile or spit out a simple press release when he’s made a move or made a major coup. He’s reading this series with great trepidation and is nervous as hell about what I’m putting into this series but I simply tell him to chill the fu#k out and I’m writing this from my perspective not his plus he neglected to send me an NDA when we started this whole deal together nearly five years ago now and even if I had signed one and he sued and got a judgement for liquidated damages against me he’d have to get in line and that the line looks pretty much like this. Over the years we’ve actually gotten to be pretty close, closer than family actually. We’re both single guys who work hard and play harder, although I will say his playmates are of a decidedly better class of females than some of the ones I go out with as are his choice of playgrounds. He’s kinda more like a presidential suite at a Grand Marriott or Ritz-Carleton while I prefer something more like the Motel 6 or America’s Best Value chains. I mean this guy spends $2,500 on a pair of frickin shoes for God’s sake and I shop at Goodwill exclusively (an I have a much better wardrobe) but to each their own. The point of that in regards to this series is that this mentee as well as many others I’ve had over the years has no clue how to be “lean” and I’ve witnessed some incredibly high burn rates at the over 60 startups I’ve advised in the past five years. It’s not just this one, he’s actually pretty good as compared to the rest and he also is king shit in my book at raising private investor monies so I give him a B- in “lean”. So with that said, I invite you to come back here in a few days because wait until you hear his next misadventure in startup land, he jumps fromn the frying pan smack dab into the fire with the next one….the CEO is about at lean as this character and I got some real odd sh#t to report to you on this one!
“ If I had asked my customer what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. -Henry Ford, Founder, Ford”
Later Taters,
