You already have a ticket for this bus
One thing that’s really annoyed me during this recent down-cycle in the technology field: Current investors criticizing founders and management for performance that occurred in the past.
Often this takes the form of “I can’t believe how much you hired / how much you were burning / how badly you missed your forecast back in [time period of something like five quarters ago]."
I’m not even talking about the all-too-common VC amnesia that occurs when investors forget that the company was hiring or spending at those levels precisely because this is what their board was demanding at the time. I’m talking instead about the distance these critics put between themselves and these teams as if they themselves aren’t part of that team. The same people who, of course, love to say “we” when things are going well and “you” when they’re not.
The way I see it, the advisory role of a startup investor is to help management figure out what the optimal next marginal decision is for the business, taking into consideration the opportunity costs of everything else the company could possibly be doing with its time and money.
It is not helpful or appropriate to indulge in fantasy scenarios where last quarter didn’t happen, last year didn’t happen, or where maybe you never invested into the company at all. You did invest in the company, and from the moment that wire cleared you bear some responsibility for everything that happens next AND you tacitly approved all immutable decisions that were made prior to that moment.
(Obviously I am not referring to a situation where it comes to light that fraud occurred or an ethical line was crossed — I’m talking about things that appear on a P&L.)
Saying “we’re burning too much, let’s get more cautious” is so fundamentally different from “I can’t believe you did that” that it might as well be a completely different language. Startups are a journey and nobody obligated you to get onto this bus. But if you’re already on the bus, you have no one to blame for that except yourself.
Stop blaming and start building.