> The people running the company were playing with fire and they must either be too junior themselves to understand that, or they were just knowingly doing so and hoping to get whatever product MVP they had planned as quickly as possible with the minimum amount of expenses possible.
Knowingly playing with fire like this is a sign of a lack of maturity, both on the founders part and the investor’s part. Anyone experienced in the business of building software would have known that:
1. It takes time
2. Time takes funding
3. It’s probably not going to work the first time you try an end-to-end test
Mature founders would have found mature investors to give them both the funding and the time to stabilize the software. They would not have attempted to make their investor demo the first big end-to-end test, and even if they did put off testing they would have communicated that to the investors, who should have understood the state of their investment only six ~months~ weeks in.
Actually, no, the #1 job of the CEO is "do not run out of money".
But, I agree that this CEO sounds like a complete cowboy. Not preparing properly for an investor meeting is ridiculous, and with that attitude, this CEO will probably run out of money sooner or later...
I suspect the author of this article will be much happier in her new job. Hopefully she knew what kind of work environments to avoid after this experience.
The CEO should not be presenting the app in the first place. Product demos should be done by someone who knows the product inside and out, knows where the unfinished bits are (if any), and has experience presenting products to investors/buyers.
Have to disagree on this a bit. The meeting in question was with an investor. The CEO should be the point person for all investor relations... especially the first meeting with said investor.
If your CEO can’t ‘sell’ the product / app/ company to an investor effectively, you won’t last.
The CEO should absolutely have the skills, knowledge and energy to sell whatever it is your business does
Oh of course the CEO should be involved with the investors, at a business level. I'm saying the CEO is not the best person to actually do the demo, in most cases. Bring along a product and sales expert to the meeting do that. Steve Jobs is the exeption that proves the rule; most CEOs do not have his showmanship.
This reminds me of the WWDCs. Tim Cook is there to introduce the products, but their engineers (or management of the individual product) are the ones to demonstrate it.
But, I guess Apple probably has people with better salesmanship skills in each product team than the startup had below the CEO. I'm arguing with myself.
Take a look at the presentation of the original iPhone. It was presented (if I remember correctly) by Steve Jobs himself. But he knew exactly which buttons to press in which order, because otherwise the phone would crash.
I think such an important presentation may/must be done by the CEO, but he must exaclty know that to do and he must prepare very well.
You can let the CEO handle the overall presentation and let someone else do the demo. The CEO should focus on the overall picture and selling it as a product, while a more technical person should do the demo. I have seen this multiple time in presentations.
> Knowingly playing with fire like this is a sign of a lack of maturity, both on the founders part and the investor’s part.
It doesn't matter really whether this is or is not knowingly.
If you are CEO and you don't know something (because you have never had any experience in IT, for example) it is your job to find people that do and give them tools to do their job well enough.
But you would not run a company without at least some experienced accountants or lawyers, I would assume any thinking person should be able to predict the same goes for software developers.
Knowingly playing with fire like this is a sign of a lack of maturity, both on the founders part and the investor’s part. Anyone experienced in the business of building software would have known that:
1. It takes time
2. Time takes funding
3. It’s probably not going to work the first time you try an end-to-end test
Mature founders would have found mature investors to give them both the funding and the time to stabilize the software. They would not have attempted to make their investor demo the first big end-to-end test, and even if they did put off testing they would have communicated that to the investors, who should have understood the state of their investment only six ~months~ weeks in.