Be careful what you ask for. A lot of people get into things for money, others for power, a few for respect.
Say you were an entrepreneur and someone came to you and:
- offered you $10M in funding but asked that you had to stay on for 3 years as a condition. Three years isn’t long, but it is an eternity online. YouTube went from URL registration to $1.65B in about 18 months…
- alternatively, what if someone else came to you and offered you $10M in funding but insisted you had to step aside and make room for their new hand-picked CEO.
Would you accept either offer? I think I would. Truth is, I think which offer you prefer has a lot to do with your state of mind. For the record, neither one of these things have happened. I swear we’re talking about the hypothetical. But as more and more advisers approach us and talk to us about the virtues of growing a company, I’ve had different people ask me how I would feel about either scenario.
Interestingly, if you wake up wanting to get the hell out of your company and do something else, I think because life is funny, then you are bound to stumble upon an investor who will tie you down forever as a condition of investing.
Alternatively, if remaining the captain was all you ever wanted and all that was important to you, I am pretty sure that someone would come along and insist that you make room for a new leader…
Trust me, life is odd that way.
I really don’t know what I would do in either situation if it happened, though.
I think, in all honesty, that if an investor came in and told me that they wanted me to step aside and make room for a new CEO, I’d check their heads because very few people know what the f*** is going to happen in web video, let alone web video content or web video advertising.
But by the same token, I also realize life is short, so if someone was capable of running a startup in such a field, it’s not like I would turn the opportunity away.
In life, you usually want what you can’t have and when you have something, you want something else. Trust me, it’s just the way life works…
Ultimately, just be grateful for having options… that’s more than what most people have.
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