| > We will end the year at $130M in annual revenues and burning ~$925K/month, we are a low gross profit margin business ~15-20% The critical question is "what is your path to profitability?" You have seemingly a positive gross margin but negative net margin? What does the gap consist of? > The strategy I would want to run as CEO is likely not something my COO or board will want to get behind and frankly I don't know if I have the energy to do it myself. It would require 24-36 months to transition the business to the new world while watching old revenue decline and waiting for new higher margin revenue build up in parallel to offset the declining revenues in the core business. Are you familiar with the Nokia "burning platform" memo? You have roughly four choices: 1) make the old pre-pivot business work (have positive net margin) 2) make the new post-pivot business work 3) raise more money through investor storytime, which is going to require a good answer to #1 or #2 and as you say carries risk of being diluted out 4) give up 5) a miracle occurs I can feel that you're very tempted to do #4, which makes #3 harder as a very high level of self-belief is necessary. It seems there are problems with #2, and #1 hasn't made it after all this time. Perhaps this is the time to get a bit confrontational with people to insist they get behind either #1 or #2 100%. > maybe for the first time in 10 years I'm asking the question "What's in it for me?" Bit late for that, sadly. "Selfless CEO" is just self-exploitation. |