[benjaminjosephw]

> It is an even harder decision to make when you don’t have an obvious replacement, or when you are not 100% confident that the obvious replacement will be an improvement over the current CEO.

When the stakes are high and the cost of keeping current leadership are potentially harmful to a dangerous degree and the only possible replacement isn't an obvious choice (as is the case with the obvious allusion to the US presidency) then this is true.

In reality, do VCs really go so far as to make the call to replace someone with someone else who has the potential to be equally bad? Isn't the risk of two consecutively bad CEOs worse than taking a little longer to find a reasonable replacement?

[ci5er]

Great question, that I am going to answer badly, based on my environment.

AV (Austin Ventures) was always known as the big fish in the little pond, ever since I moved here from Japan - and I guess that isn't wrong, but they seemed to have moved onto their version of PE.

But one thing that always irritated me and my "executive" friends was how much they liked to put somebody on their back-bench into your job.

If it's the right choice - nice. If it happens once-or-twice - nice. But If they do it 9 months after every Series A every time, it starts to make a (n aware) founder wary).

I generally don't think founders should be CEOs. Certainly as a founder I should not have been But that doesn't mean youo bring out the brick-bat. It means that you sit down and say something: "Don't you think we should hire the new CEO together and figure our your ongoing role in the company (esp. since you still own 60%)?).

I don't know - I just found them heavy handed.

I don't know that I ever hit at them hard or that they hit at me hard, but I do know that they came in hard and triggered a hard response. At this point, I don't think they like me much (which is sad, because I was just getting to like them), but there are a lot of personal relationships (apparently) in this business

[ci5er]

Yes. I don't know how regular it is, but Austin Ventures used to regularly kill founder CEOs after Series B (maybe (probably?) correctly), but replace them from a bunch of bench-players (we used to call them "the Boys Club". They would generally wreck the company, but AV played enough shell games that they, the LPs and their friends always made out OK.

EDIT: They (AV) have more recently (not super-recently) moved into mostly PE, and the incubator seems to be gone (?), but given the VC penchant to syndicate, and AV's penchant to not be nice to work with, even as the big-fish in a small pond, the number of people at places like Interwest or Sevin Rosen to work with them (Central Texas VC types), maybe they felt constrained? Or maybe they shot enough entrepreneurs in the back? Their 5-year-ago-fund was big enough to qualify for PE activity - maybe their new-new partners (the old ones retired about that time) decided they would prefer to apply their Wharton MBA skills/talents to PE? IDK.

[ci5er]

By Gawd - I certainly don't mind being down-voted, but since this is not Reddit, would people give the courtesy of telling me what they disagree with? Is that too much to ask?