Why Do All Founders End Up Getting Fired?!
Have you founded a company? Get ready to get fired! Someone is probably breathing at your neck and biding his time with the board of directors to fire you! It's not the trend anymore, it's the norm, the rule.
Even if you have started a dairy farm and you are the only worker in it, the cows will probably fire you.
The crazy thing is, people in your company will sooner or later figure out you are just an option and putting up roadblocks to their ambitious ventures, so you need to go.
Eduardo Saverin at least got a lot of screen space from the runaway hit, The Social Network. From the looks of it, you don't seem to be someone on whom we can start making a movie. So it would be great to probably start working on your defenses right now.
Understand you are dispensable.
Company founders are always in the sorry state all the time, that "nothing is going to happen to me." Until the bomb goes off and one bright sunny day, when you thought everything is just fine, the board of directors fires you.
So work on your company. Don't just laze around drinking mugs of coffee and cleaning your desk with your filthy shoes. Get involved. Dammit, you are the CEO. We need you to take some responsibilities. If you keep churning out great ideas for the company, not only will you avoid getting fired, you will earn a lot of respect, which is like a salary without the bucks.
Get everything written on stone.
You just can't believe anything on the basis of "mouthing." It might sound really right at the time you made the deal, it might even continue that way, but do remember that when it comes to money, everything changes. If someone promised you a share of half when the valuation was only a million dollars, it might be working for you. But once it reaches a billion dollars, something triggers off an alarm on his head which tells him. "Damn, this billion can be mine!"
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati