“Having information that the other side doesn’t have gives [VCs] an advantage… they take advantage of entrepreneurs who haven’t been through this before… they were totally willing to take advantage of us.”
“Any time we would talk to another VC, [our investors] would talk him out of it: ‘This is not a good company’… So we were really stuck with [our existing investors] for the next round.”
“Because we weren’t having success finding a CEO, [our investors] insisted that we hire these managers [a temporary CEO and CFO]. That didn’t go great.”
“During the whole funding process they said, ‘We’re interested in you guys because of your management team; we think you’re fantastic…’ Two weeks later they pull me into the office – before even the first board meeting – and say, ‘We want to replace you as CEO.’”
“At [SGI] board meetings… Jim [Clark’s] face would get red and he’d start shouting that [an investor and board member] had cheated him and his engineers.”
All quotes are from Founders at Work except for the last quote which is from The New New Thing.