Category Archives: Venture Files

Startup Layoffs — The Unkindest Cut

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Watch for RollingHeads.jpgLast week, Seesmic let seven of its 21 employees go — a full third of the company. Were they in a crisis? Depends on how you look at it. CEO Loic LeMeur had raised $12M, a Series B $6M of which came in June. But do the math: 21 employees, fully loaded is around $200k/month. Tack on bandwidth, storage, other hosting costs, legal and other services, marketing expenses, T&E . . . expenses are upwards of $300k/month. And with negligible revenue, that’s pure burn. At that rate, Seesmic would hit the wall in just over a year.

There comes a point in every CEO’s life when they realize that things have turned for the worse. Accompanying that realization — along with a gnawing knot in the stomach — is the stark reality that something needs to be done about it. These are the times that try . . . you know the speech.

CEOs worth their salt — or if they’re rosey-glassed types who prefer to ignore bad news, then the COO realists who watch their backs — keep an eye on the numbers, and know exactly when breakeven’s coming . . . or when the money’s going to run out. What changes things — and probably what changed for Le Meur — is the wellspring drying up. And at that burn rate, in this climate, he would have to start raising another round in six months (it always takes longer than you’d think).

Oh — there’s one other thing. Seesmic’s Series C would probably be at a lower valuation than Series B. You want to see things get complicated (ugly, even), go through a down round. New money makes out all right (it’s called the Alternative Golden Rule), but previous investors get squeezed. (Angels often get squished.) Employee options go underwater, plagues and locusts descend, and there’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So Le Meur did what he had to do.

Letting people go is a miserable experience. And no matter how carefully you plan it, how humanely you handle it, it sucks. Everyone knows startups are risky, but startup hires are the most passionate, dedicated folks around. (Yours aren’t? Sorry — you hired the wrong ones!) Meanwhile, company founders think only of success. They radiate it. And they make promises, explicit or implied, to every employee ‘join us, work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.’ I’ve said those words dozens (really, maybe hundreds) of times. So when it comes down to having to let people go, a promise is broken. To them. And to their families.

Layoffs suck. But they beat the hell out of running out of money.

When all financing options disappear, your world comes crashing down, believe me. Once you’ve been there, you take a far more pragmatic view of letting people go.

I expect in the current climate to see a number of RIF announcements. I hope they’re done right. (There is a way to do it right.) Because on those occasions when they’re not, things are going to be interesting. Unlike the first bubble, today everyone’s voice can be heard — blogging, twittering, commenting, we can expect to read (and hear, if people comment using Seesmic) about some remarkably uncivil behavior, especially on the part of first-time CEOs.

Next post: Layoffs done decent.

Get a Management System — Now

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This is a continuation of the series that began with Startups Need Management, Too

tps report2.jpgAll the warnings about the forthcoming next nuclear winter for startups drive home the need for a management system. Tough times call for tough measures, but that doesn’t mean CEOs should get carte blanche for discretionary cuts — a sure way to undermine morale.

Among other things, having a management process in place sets the stage for making cuts when they need to be made. Why? Because even without resorting to old-school ranking-and-rating, in a good management system, performances (and non-performances) are visible company-wide.

I’m still stunned at how many companies operate without a management process of some kind. Not just a plan . . . but a regularly recurring process, with weekly monitoring, that ensures critical company milestones are met — and leads to consequences if it’s not.

So if you haven’t got one, now is a helluva good time to get started on a planning/management process. If your company has one in place, dramatic events may call for a mid-cycle re-plan.

The argument for doing quarterly planning is its horizon — it’s hard to see much beyond 13 weeks. Who can really say they know what conditions will be like come January 1, 2009? Much less for a 3- or 5-year plan.

(Which is not to say your company doesn’t need long-term goals. VCs usually only want to see 3- to 5-year plans as a reality check (or sanity check). They know better than anyone that even the startups that succeed rarely do so by adhering to the plan they funded. But it’s a good test for founders, to articulate whether they have their sites set on a profitable $15M business two years out . . . or are going for global domination of mobile advertising by Year 5.)

Back to quarterly planning — and in particular the elements of Quarterly Objectives and Key Results that I brought up in the last post. Although the process needs to evolve within any company, the basic premises are three:

1. Top-management expectations come first. Could be just a one-sheet with simple but clear expectations for, say, sales, shipments, user registrations, feature releases — whatever the major performance metrics for the quarter are. Whether or not there’s a board of directors asking for it, it’s the CEO’s job.

2. Every exempt employee prepares a set of Objectives & Key Results. If the company is big enough to have departments, employees work with their managers to develop them — four to six Objectives with four to six Key Results (more on these below).

3. After each quarter, Objectives are reviewed and self-graded, and next quarter’s are proposed, in a peer setting. Key here is that each employee acknowledges what happened last quarter — and what they’ll do next quarter — in the presence of their peers.

Now, some are you are sitting there saying, “Sounds like big-company bullshit.” To which I say, “Bullshit.” (Touché!) Do you really think everyone working hard, with a good attitude is a way to ensure milestones are met? To ensure that roles, much less departments, are coordinated? No. Not only is there too much to keep in any one’s head, but things change. All the time. If you have your eye on the goal — pin it to the wall in front of you — and you monitor weekly, big surprises are far less likely.

“Inch by inch is a cinch — yard by yard is hard”

Corny, but it makes a point: monitor progress every week.

I won’t suggest that even this ‘simple’process I’m recommending isn’t pain-free. There are usually several iterations, especially when multiple departments (engineering, marketing, sales) dependencies are getting sorted out (“I can’t launch Week 44 unless Tom agrees to freeze code by Week 40″)

But at the end of the exercise, every employee — the CEO is not exempt — has a roadmap of the most important things for them to focus on over the next 13 weeks.

I can’t emphasize how effective this process (or one like it) is in not only getting things done, but in maintaining employee morale. There’s no hiding, no slacking — everyone’s work is visible. No more “What the hell does Chris do?” Everyone’s Objectives are on the server (or intranet, or Basecamp, or whatever you’re using). And every week at your staff meeting (what — you still don’t believe in meetings?), all the Objectives (sorted by week) are checked off . . . again, in front of peers. (Peer performance is a great motivator — no one wants to show up for Monday morning’s meeting and get marked ‘Not Done’in front of others.)

What the Docs Look Like

QO pic.jpgThough few words, drafting of Objectives and Key Results takes some time to get the hang of. In general, I would describe each employee’s four- to six-page document as:

‘A guide which, if 75% to 85% achieved, would signify successful execution for the quarter.’

Why only 75% to 85%? Because everyone should have stretch goals . . . and therefore should not be expected to hit 100% of them.

So how is each Objective expressed? It should be broad, categorical, and have no dates. Examples might be ‘RELEASE v1.5,’or ‘SECURE MANUFACTURING PARTNERSHIP,’or ‘GROW SALES AT LEAST 10% Y/Y,’or ‘COMMENCE PATENT PROCESS,’or ‘EXPAND DEVELOPMENT TEAM.’ They’re allowed to sound vague — they’re the Big Efforts, and each individual should have at most six. Any more, and people are being set up to fail. Put each one at the top of a separate page.

The steps — specific milestones — to achieving each Objective — are quantified by Key Results, which are measurable, and include dates (in our work-week format). Again, try to have four to six of them. So your CTO’s Objective ‘RELEASE v1.5′ might have the following Key Results: ‘FREEZE CODE W40,’‘COMPLETE QA W43,’‘COMPLETE USER TESTING W47,’‘FINAL REVISION W49,’‘BLOG RELEASE NOTES W50, and ‘UPLOAD v1.5 W51′ (although a Christmas release may be unduly harsh on your development team).

The idea is to give focus your very busy people on the few items — Objectives — that really matter. An while Objectives are mostly vague, Key Results use specific action verbs — ‘COMPLETE,’‘HIRE,’‘ANNOUNCE,’not ‘Continue,’Investigate,’‘Study,’etc. — so that there’s no ambiguity as to what ‘Done’means.

There’s much more than can be spelled out here. And many ways to skin this cat. (Apologies to cat lovers.) Finally, while this is an example of a process to help keep the company’s execution on track, there’s another dimension (which I’ll address in a subsequent post): people management. They’re not the same.

Especially in these dark days, this is intended to get you thinking about taking real steps to get your team to pull together and sharpen execution — even if there are only two of you. Exercises like this force you to articulate your thinking, and you’ll be surprised how often your partners, whom you talk to every day, are surprised.

If you’d like to receive a more detailed description and examples of Quarterly Objectives and Key Results, email me at rcapece at technosailor dot com.

Startups Need Management, Too

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Grove High Output Management (FINAL).jpgProspectors joining the dot-com gold rush in the ’90s were mainly coming from large organizations seeking to capture some of the new wealth. But along with the promises of stock options and casual dress came another bonus — no bureaucracy. No meetings! No Microsoft Exchange! And no more onerous management systems.

Disciplined startups recognized that management systems were important — for setting and hitting milestones, and for giving employees adequate frameworks to perform and feel good about themselves and their company. But more often there was extreme swinging of the pendulum that led to free-wheeling, hair-on-fire mismanagement, wildly missed targets . . . and lots of disgruntled campers.

Driven by the mantra of ‘first to market wins,’ dot-com startups were hiring way too fast, pushing employees way too hard (I remember one of our VCs saying he expected all employees to keep a sleeping bag at the office), and eschewing management systems entirely. In the end, a lot of folks went back to their big companies, happy for a return to structure, sanity, and their 401k . . . even with a pay cut.

The fact is, every organization needs a management system. It just needs to be appropriate for the company’s stage.

Much has been written about motivating employees. The admirable folks at web-app developer 37 Signals (makers of Basecamp and other popular utilities) espouse a four-day week and flexible hours, and for the most part, I ascribe to their philosophy. But I also have seen lots of companies provide increasing perqs to increasingly dissatisfied lots of employees.

What it gets down to is that providing the right amount of structure, goal-setting, and feedback — and communicating clearly — does more for esteem and spirit than all the free food and Friday afternoon keggers ever will.

After a six-month stint consulting for a startup to help it transition from a service to a product business, I joined the company full time as COO. It had about 20 employees. The CEO had good transparency — employees got monthly updates on progress and direction — but individuals had tasks, rather than goals, and no way of seeing how their roles fit into the bigger picture.

This is one of the key tenets of management: people want to know how their contribution fits in — how their efforts (along with their counterparts’) ‘roll up’in support of the company’s overarching goal.

One of my charges was to institute a planning and management system. And it’s honestly one of the most satisfying aspects of management — especially when you see people responding . . . when they come by at the end of the day to tell you ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing here,’or ‘we really needed this.’
Startups’management systems (and culture) are usually brought by the founders from their antecedents. Most of my management experience came from a manufacturing startup. My co-founder came from chip-leader Intel Corp. — along with a fairly high percentage of our initial hires — we essentially followed Intel’s management disciplines, policies, and procedures. In hindsight, it was one of the smart things we did. Intel was an extremely well run company. (I subsequently became a huge fanboy of then-CEO Andy Grove and his management books.)

I adopted Intel’s Quarterly Objectives and Key Results methodology, and have used it (with a few of my own variations) ever since.

To be sure, shipping a manufactured product requires a different discipline than the ‘just get it out there and revise it later’ strategy of web apps. But certain management principles are universal, and over the course of working both in hardware and software companies, I came to understand which ones they were.

One of the principles that always took a while to convince people of was the work-week calendar. Lots of them are available, but in particular, many manufacturing companies split the year up into four 13-week periods . . . usually with ‘4-4-5‘ months. (Mainly to ensure a ‘linear shipping’schedule, making it easier to hit quarterly shipment targets and to compare quarter-to-quarter performance.) But it’s something I found to work well in hardware, software, and Internet businesses.

Why? Because over time — it usually takes three quarters or so — the numbered weeks start to stick, and people in the company realize that it’s a lot easier to reckon you have 11 weeks till year end (we’re in Week 41 right now) than calculating the number of days between October 8 and December 31. More importantly, employees and managers get into a recurring 13-week rhythm, which has certain psychological advantages.

And why is it so important to think in terms of quarterly performance? Whether you’ve just got plans to make money, hit revenue and profit targets, and grow — or serious ambitions to become a public company (IPOs will return someday!) — ‘making the numbers’each quarter is a discipline that should begin early.

Next post: The Basics of the Quarterly Objectives process.

Chapter 11, Pt. 2: Hard Lessons from the Chapter

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This is a continuation of the series that began with Chapter 11: To File or Not to File

t shirt final.jpgConvinced that we could get all our creditors’cooperation without formally filing for protection under Chapter 11, we proceeded nonetheless to get experienced professionals on board. The workout team was assembled — insiders including myself and my CFO, our chairman, a bankruptcy attorney from our law firm, and a workout specialist, Ralph. Except for the two pros, we were all new to this . . . and school was now in session.

Lesson No. 1: Make sure you have the right workout team.

Ralph was not what you’d expect. Rumpled, belly-over-the-belt, pinky ring. (We later concluded his approach was effective because the creditors would never confuse him with being a ‘slick suit’out to take advantage.) But we were awed by his work. Like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction who masterfully wipes away every trace of a grisly crime, then goes out for breakfast — Ralph was more artisan than artist. With speed and precision he wended through our 97 creditors, triaging them into three buckets, getting cooperation to his plan — in writing — from nearly all of them in a matter of weeks. The guy knew what he was doing.

He also knew well the brick wall that lay ahead: the largest, secured creditors. When it came down to it, it took just three of the 97 creditors — the owner of our million-dollar testers, the bank holding the lease on our 100,000-square-foot facility, and our primary equipment lessor — to nix the deal.

Lesson No. 2: Large secured creditors know that their chances of recovering debts depend on a company’s survival — and chances of that are much better behind bankruptcy law’s skirts.

By law, the big guys had the power to force us to file . . . and they did. Lord knows I wanted to avoid it, from a personal standpoint. See, the secured creditors had also sealed the fate of my founder’s shares, roughly 15% of the company. Why? Because in a Ch. 11 reorganization, all bets are off — the capitalization chart is wiped out, and a new one gets put in its place. If not handled properly, this could be a big problem for your stock-incentivized employees. (Remember the importance of those neurons.)

Lesson No. 3: Take good care of the workforce.

Without any cajoling, the Board agreed to reconstitute employee stock options — a design engineer with options for 1% of the old company would end up with 1% of the new company. Simple, straightforward. As for me, I was at the mercy of the Board, who couldn’t see their way clear to reconstituting my ownership entirely since, despite all good intentions, I was a member of the management team that presided over the meltdown. (Unlike today, people once believed in management accountability.) But as the saying goes, 2% of something is better than 100% of bupkus.

What followed was nothing short of a casebook classic on Chapter 11 — if not a Guinness record. The company went in and out of bankruptcy in 88 days. We had done everything right, and it was a beautiful thing.

Lesson No. 4: Provide a sufficiently creditor-approved plan to the bankruptcy judge on the day you file.

More often than not, companies in trouble file for Ch. 11, then take three months or more to develop the plan, only to have it stall somewhere between the bankruptcy judge and disgruntled creditors. We had nary a complaint from any of our creditors, and here’s why.

First, the 74 smallest ones — those owed less than $10,000 — were paid 100% on the dollar. (Ralph knew the little guys would make the most noise, and it’s never worth the trouble to pay them anything less.) Total paid to this group: $294,000. The next class of creditors (the 19 owed between $10,000 and $100,000) would receive 75 cents on the dollar. This group too had no issues. Total paid out: $343,000. Lastly, the four secured creditors — owed a whopping $4.2M — were paid 10 cents on the dollar, plus given low-priced warrants to purchase shares of common stock. Everyone took the deal (technically, they had to — once the judge’s gavel comes down, it’s the law), with the exception of the bank, which had a policy against owning shares in customers’companies, and forewent the warrants.

New money was of course equally crucial to the plan. Most — but not all — new funding came from existing investors. The proposition was: “œYou’ve already put $4M into this fine company, which bought you 15%. You could write it all off “¦ but why not put an additional $400,000 in, and reclaim your 15% in the newco?” It worked with every investor except a few of the European ones (Europe still hasn’t fully grasped the Ch. 11 concept). In all, $2.5M of new money came in — enough to get the company through to solid profitability and positive cash flow. (Don’t forget, we were growing our business of building and selling chips all through the process. Customers have less of a problem with it than you might think — after all, who of us didn’t fly Delta or United through their bankruptcies?)

Lesson No. 5: Do your best to maintain morale, but remember — the employees that stick around through tough times are the only ones you should have hired in the first place.

The final elements to consider were the intangibles — company culture and morale were big ones. (Don’t underestimate the importance of changing the logo!) We knew at this point that it was really just about the employees, now down to 75 die-hards. True, despite every effort to retain them — the ‘Oh, Thank Heaven . . .’ t-shirts (playing off the popular convenience-store jingle at the time) were a touch I’m especially proud of — you’re bound to lose a few. But as the manager of the team that remained, I still get misty thinking about the quality, perseverance, and attitude of the group.

Filing for protection under Chapter 11 is a grave decision — and not the right prescription for every ailing business. Our company was a superb candidate because it had the right fundamentals — strong demand for its products, a solid asset base in intellectual property, willing investors, and leadership capable of boosting morale while managing the day-to-day business.

Chapter 11, Pt. 1: To File, or Not to File?

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Misery final.jpgIt’s a timely topic, but when asked to detail my experience with Chapter 11, the line that came to mind was from the end of ‘Misery’, when James Caan is lunching with his agent: “Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were asking me to dredge up the worst horror of my life, just so we could make a few bucks.” But though I never hope to put the experience to use again, it provided valuable lessons (plus, my company — Lattice Semiconductor — prevailed, and grew to a quarter-billion dollars in sales) and serves as a cautionary tale to entrepreneurs as we enter some tough times ahead.

So here is the tale — of a company that ran up expenses too far ahead of revenue, hit the wall, then succeeded with a ‘do-over’by putting one of America’s great pieces of legislation — the 11th Chapter (Reorganization) under Title 11 (Bankruptcy) of the United States Code — to work.

________

The old regime ousted, my new CFO and I (promoted to COO) — several months into a salary moratorium, since the company was down to the very last of its cash — were on a mission to raise fresh capital. First on our list of VCs was NEA, and we were hiking up Knob Hill (ridiculous, but we were trying to save cab fare) to the exclusive San Francisco club where the Sand Hill Road VCs had deigned to meet us. We hurried through the massive portico, past — was that a cellist? — down a triple-wide marble staircase to an enormous room with nothing but an easel and elegantly set table.

But we weren’t to dine that day.

The VCs motioned to us just as lunch was being served, and we earnestly began the pitch for our hot computer-chip company. But by the time we realized we weren’t getting fed, it was pretty clear they weren’t going to invest either.

What we did give us that day was a lesson — etched forever in my memory of pristine crystal and gilt-edged china on crisp linen. (Was it because it served as so perfect a metaphor for the venture capitalist ideal . . . or were we just hungry?)

“œWe VCs like to pull ourselves up to a fresh table,” the lead partner said, stroking the linen and aligning his silverware for emphasis. “œYou’re going to have to clean house.”

We knew what he meant — or thought we knew. Though we had sales exceeding $1M a quarter and referenceable customers like Compaq, we had problems. A burn rate that would snap your neck, for one — $750k a month, anchored by a 10-year building lease and a crushing debt load. Then there was that undigestible shareholding of my megalomaniacal co-founder, whom we had forced out only weeks before: an eye-popping 35% ownership in the company.

These were problems we naïvely believed a fresh round of financing could fix. But the VCs had dosed us with reality that day. Despite how hard we’d worked to get where we were — endured three months without pay . . . gritted through laying off a third of our 175 employees . . . pulled off the board coup and CEO ouster — the barons of Sand Hill Road had declared us unfundable. To pound the table-setting metaphor one last time: we were the morning after a bacchanalian orgy.

The Unutterable

Back at our offices, none dared utter ‘Chapter 11′ outside the board room. It wasn’t shame we feared, but the booming voice of conventional wisdom: as a chip company, you’re dependent not just on intellectual property, but on know-how — an asset buried deep in the neurons of key engineers. Spook them, and you’re liable to ‘lose the recipe.’ (The semiconductor business is legendary for nuances wildly affecting yield, also known as KGD or known good die per wafer — the all-important metric that dictates profit and loss.) The thinking was, if you so much as mention Chapter 11, key employees flee, production goes to hell, and you’re left with . . . nothing.

Management and investors gnashed and thrashed over whether to file. While the Code was drafted with us in mind — keeping the creditors at bay and allowing you to conduct business as usual as you work out a plan to repay them — we couldn’t get over our fears. So, like others before (and many to follow), we came to an ill-informed conclusion: We’ll work everything out without filing for Chapter 11. Surely everyone will go along with it, since it will have a much better chance of success! Who wouldn’t prefer it to being crammed down by a curmudgeonly bankruptcy judge? It will be so much more . . . civil!

Only, it doesn’t work that way. Next in Part 2: Hard Lessons in the Chapter.

Pony in the Pile

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This week’s Interact 2008 conferencemad men 2.png — all things interactive media — began upbeat enough, with Ted Leonsis‘s inspirational keynote signaling an ‘anything’s possible, mix-and-mashup’world of opportunity where entrepreneurs can offer (and perhaps find) fulfillment by providing one of the five keys to self-actualization: relationships, community, self-expression, giving back, or pursuing a higher calling.

But then, the sky began to darken.

With each successive speaker and panel, the mood turned increasingly somber, until by the end of the afternoon — terrabanged by the announcement of the failed bailout and a Dow plummeting 777 points — somber turned to sober . . . and the ad/marketing audience lit out to quench the condition at Happy Hour.

Actually, Leonsis foreshadowed the day’s drama with his own sobering statement: “Today, a marketing person needs to be a mathematician,” and not the English major that he was. Everyone knew exactly what he meant, of course. It’s about metrics, and testing, and deliverables that can be measured — a theme echoed several times during the day. Google VP of Search Product and UX Marissa Mayer talked about nuanced A/B testing, where reducing spacing a single pixel-width — or bathing paid search in a field of yellow rather than blue — resulted in 20% to 40% more click-throughs. Launchbox Digital‘s Sean Greene had asked the panel he was moderating on ‘The Evolution of Advertising Models’ what the near-term effects of the dismal economy would be on ad spending, and the unanimous response was “a shift to what’s measureable” (hopefully, social ads in search of the elusive ‘engage’metric won’t be left twisting in the wind).

You could almost feel the room heave a collective sigh: “We know, we know — we need to bone up on this technical widgified social media stuff.”

But there was little letup. Avenue A/Razorfish‘s Joe Crump was nearly morose, acknowledging (in a talk aptly titled ‘Digital Darwinism’) that not only is the rate of change of technology overwhelming, but current org charts are woefully ill equipped to deal with it in creative organizations. By early afternoon, Adobe evangelist Duane Nickull and Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar had applied a thick coat of glaze discussing SOA (tell the truth: did you know that it stands for Service Oriented Architecture?) and widget distribution strategies. Finally, the afternoon wrapped with a panel presenting a glass-half-empty outlook for interactive media employment that could be summed up as a grey-hair lament something like: “We need to hire more whiz kids that understand this stuff . . . but they’re a dickens to manage.”

Good thing we entrepreneurs are optimists. Why, there must be a pony in this pile!

The great words of someone famous come to mind: Out of adversity comes opportunity (or is it creativity?). Either way, there’s a dislocation, a discontinuity, a gap that begs for a solution. Here, the gap is agencies’and marketing departments’inability to keep up with technology of social media. So might be the solution?

Maybe training.

Maybe analytics tools or services.

Maybe app-building for hire.

Now, Crump shouldn’t actually be complaining — of Avenue A/Razorfish’s 500 employees, 200 are technical. But I’m not sure any of the best and the brightest (you know who you are) want to bury themselves in an agency with a salary and long hours.

So what’s the entrepreneurial play here?

Although VCs have historically shied away from service businesses — the multiples were usually far greater in product businesses — that scenario has changed. And in fact, it could solve several problems at once. If you’re dismayed that VCs want you to recite your revenue model (even though, like me, you expect you’ll figure it out once users have embraced you), there could be an alternative to raising money altogether: How about getting paid for what you love to do (and do well)? If in the course of providing your service, you’re also building a product, or developing some intellectual property (IP), then you’re in fact building equity in a service business.

I wrote about BuddyMedia creating ‘branded’Facebook apps (They actually received funding from Bay Partners and others), and they’re a good example of ‘filling the gap’for big agencies. But a better example may be Set Consulting. President/founder Jared Goralnick is passionate about productivity, and Set gets paid to improve clients’productivity. But in the course of doing his work, Goralnick also built a product — AwayFind — aimed at avoiding ‘email bankruptcy.’Voila! . . . a cashflow business, with an equity kicker.

And no VC. Ironically, when you get that combination working for you — and you really don’t need the money — is when the VCs come a-knockin.’