Black Dot creates and nurtures black entrepreneurs by providing space and access to resources uniquely geared to African Americans.  And they address the unique problems that black entrepreneurs face when starting a business.

K. Wyking Garrett, Aramis Hamer, Monica Washington, and Mujale Chisebuka started Black Dot in 2015 after their participation in a startup event, Hack the Central District.  (clockwise from upper left: Mjuale Chisebuka, Monica Washington, K. Wyking Garrett and Aramis Hamer. Photo:  Geekwire  Photo credit:  Ken Lapworth.)

Black Dot offers membership to an amazing community of likeminded entrepreneurs. This membership includes affordable shared and private workspaces for rent, events and workshops, support and mentorship, and a place to hang out.

Curtiss Calhoun is the Community Manager at Black Dot and Lead Program Director. He shared his thoughts on what makes Black Dot special and where this organization is headed. Quotations are his unless otherwise noted.

Black Dot Serves a (Very) Wide Variety of Entrepreneurs

There is no “typical” black entrepreneur.  Community members range from accountants to real estate brokers, restaurant owners, and high tech CEOs.

“It’s an amazing community. I along with Jenefeness Tucker have facilitated weekly Mastermind sessions since Oct 2018.  Some just have an idea or concept they are thinking about.  And then we’ve had people like a telecom guy who was just awarded $10 million to start his own phone network in Africa.”

Mastermind Mondays is a program where black entrepreneurs can connect, get inspired and solve problems.  Anyone can attend.  People join in from around the US.  Even other countries, including a group of exchange students from Spain who stayed connected with the group when they returned home.

Mastermind offers a sense of family that people look forward to every week and can count on as a source of support.

Curtiss Calhoun leading a Mastermind Mondays session.  Photo:  Black Dot

When I asked Curtiss to talk about the unique hurdles black entrepreneurs face when starting a business, his answer was powerful:

“The #1 hurdle is being Black.  Walking into a bank, being black, asking for money is just a different experience.  Not so much the process.  But the way the system is set up to make it more difficult to gain access to resources to start, build, and scale.”

He focused on three areas:  lack of access to capital, business acumen (systems and structures), and affordable commercial space.

Capital

“A lot of people are good at something and they start a business.  And it grows by word of mouth.  But they don’t have enough capital and available liquid resources to weather the storms new businesses face.”

According to FIX, a systems design company founded in 2008 to solve complex urban challenges with place-based solutions:

• 28 MM US small businesses generate 64% of all new private sector jobs
• African Americans own just 7% of small businesses but represent nearly twice that as a percent of the total population
• Most small businesses start and expand using personal savings. But African Americans have 12x less median family wealth than whites and are 50% less likely to own their homes. So they don’t have these sources of capital to get started
• African American are 22% more likely to use personal credit cards to start a business

Business Acumen

Many aspiring black entrepreneurs don’t come from traditional business backgrounds.  In addition to hosting Mastermind Mondays, Black Dot provides a number of different educational opportunities to address this, including hosting guest speakers and cross-industry professional networking events.

Black Dot is planning to add a formal startup curriculum, so black entrepreneurs can become certified and have the skills to be successful at whatever business they decide to start.

William Grose Center. Photo Black Dot

Affordable Commercial Space

Many black entrepreneurs have businesses that require physical space.  But if you are a retailer or restaurant owner, the initial costs can be prohibitive.

One of the spaces Black Dot will have a presence in will be the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation, a decommissioned firehouse which the Africatown Community Land Trust has taken ownership of and is currently renovating.  It will primarily serve as an innovation hub and resource center for micropreneurs, solopreneurs and small business owners.  They are planning to open in August 2021 and continue to build out additional space / capability.

How to Get Involved

I wanted to draw your attention to Black Dot because I suspect there are many similar black entrepreneur communities operating all over the country.  And if each of us in the business world can find a way to support them, in whatever way we can, it will raise us all up.

So, my question to you is … what can you do?

Donate your money (always useful) to help underwrite similar programs in your community

Share your skills, whether it’s to lead a seminar or speak on an emerging technology

Open your networks, and introduce black entrepreneurs and community leaders to other organizations they might do business with

Pass the word on, and invite others to get involved

Volunteer

Let me know what happens!

Calling All Food and Agriculture Entrepreneurs!

Grow-NY is a competition for startups with growth potential in food and agriculture. This includes:  physical products, hardware or software technologies, food, fuels, fibers, raw materials, and processes or systems. The startup must operate in the Grow-NY region for at least 12 months.

Deadline for submissions is July 15.  Finalists will get help in the form of mentorship, pitch training and a 3-day business development trip to the region to network with potential partners.

$3MM Dollar Ag-Tech Competition – $1MM Top Prize

2019 winners included a wild and wonderful range of ideas:

• Real Eats, a healthy meal delivery service – $1,000,000
• Dropcopter, automated pollination of orchard crops using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) – $500,000
• Tiliter, software that uses AI and machine learning to automatically identify products (this is a Red Delicious apple, not a Pink Lady apple) – $500,000
• Capro-X, a system that turns Greek yogurt whey into bio-oil – $250,000
• Combplex, laser technology that eliminates mites that can devastate honeybee hives – $250,000
• The Perfect Granola, a food company that helps those in need and empowers the underserved – $250,000
• Whole Healthy Food, a natural way to reduce your body’s carbohydrate/calorie intake without changing your diet – $250,000

Continuing to Build on Unique Local Strengths

Source: The History Center

I not only went to Cornell twice, but I was born in Ithaca NY.  So I have many happy memories of visiting my grandparents there as a child.  For most of these halcyon years the Ithaca area was thriving, with companies like Smith Corona, National Cash Register, and Ithaca Gun.  But when these companies left or went out of business in the 70’s and ‘80’s, they took a large chunk of the local economy with them.

So it was extremely heartening to discover how enterprising and resilient this area actually has been over the years.

This fascinating history of Tompkins County’s entrepreneurial roots from the History Center speaks to the full range of companies that started and flourished here over the years.  Flour mills, confectioners, woolen mills, pottery works, iron bridges, iron works, calendar clocks, tobacco and cigar manufacturers, glass works, organs, bicycle chains, guns, typewriters, egg incubators, sauerkraut, silent films, pocketbooks, turbine components, cash registers, Moog synthesizers, high precision measurement tools, beer, and chocolates.

The region has always had wonderful growing conditions (the reward for its terrible winters). It also offers excellent water sources and hardworking people.  And because only Cornell University has both a top 10 agriculture program and a top 10 computer and information science program this university is uniquely able to stimulate research and innovation.  The combination is fertile, shall we say?

Grow-NY funding is provided by Empire State Development through its Upstate Revitalization Initiative. The competition will be administered by Cornell’s Center for Regional Economic Advancement.

With the Grow-NY competition now in its second year, I’m looking forward to seeing what this partnership will accomplish.

This past January I was at WeWork Labs to present to a group of maritime startups.  Just before I stood up to speak, my sponsor Elizabeth Scallon casually mentioned that I would be presenting using a digital whiteboard.  She told me I should just mark up the board with comments, and she’d send everyone the meeting notes with the full discussion.

Now normally I misunderstand or break virtually anything even vaguely mechanical.  So I was not expecting this to go well.  But the overall experience proved incredibly intuitive.  I asked Elizabeth where she found the whiteboard.  Turns out the company, Vibe, is another WeWork Labs startup; they had launched in July and were looking for user feedback.  So I wrote and asked if I could try one out.  They very kindly delivered one portable smartboard to my house for me to play with (break).

I’m sure many of you have been following the news about the spread of the Coronavirus, and the resulting advice being offered businesses.  Avoid travel, avoid in person meetings, work from home.  But the need for collaboration doesn’t stop.

I was planning to play with Vibe more before writing about it.  But given these recent headlines I thought it made more sense to let you know about the company now.  You decide if this is something you might find useful.

Didn’t mean to erase that

Whiteboards have been around since the 90’s and are used to solve problems, visualize ideas, and define workflows.

Vibe board was designed from scratch to fill a gap left behind by Samsung, Microsoft, and Google whose solutions tend to be expensive and/or restrictive. Vibe features a digital whiteboard, video conferencing, wireless screen-casting, and integrates with a wide range of third party applications (e.g. Slack, Google Drive, Office, Dropbox, Zoom) to allow teams to collaborate remotely and seamlessly at a more affordable price (under $3000).  Teams can share Vibe boards easily through a simple code – no Vibe device necessary – and Vibe keeps the content safe in the cloud.

Here’s Vibe’s take on how they compare.

Vibe feels your pain

Source: Vibe

“The problems we set out to solve were the same problems that we faced ourselves. Before Vibe was created, we used a stack of independent apps and software to collaborate across China and U.S. We wanted to create one tool – an immersive virtual environment that could enable effortless communication from anywhere, all with a dash of magic — kind of like our product’s namesake, the “vibes” of the Harry Potter universe.”  Charles Yang, founder and CEO

Vibe is actively working with customers on new feature requests.  So if you have been considering using a digital white board for collaborating during Coronavirus, now might be the time to act.

*This Nobel Prize winner wrote Love in the Time of Cholera which is well worth reading.

Marine biology program.  Emergency physician practice. Technology to extract contaminants.  Data and insights platform. Trucking app and online platform. Fishing gear recycling program.  Least-cost ballast water treatment system.  White fish jerky.  Zero-emission electric outboard motor. Battery-powered energy storage system. Exhaust gas after treatment system.

Okay, the headline may have tipped you off. They are all innovations from startups participating in the Maritime Blue Innovation Accelerator, the first of its kind in Washington State.

About the Maritime Blue Innovation Accelerator

On January 6, WeWork Labs, the Port of Seattle and WA Department of Commerce’s Maritime Blue kicked off their Maritime Blue Innovation Accelerator.  The program aims to establish the region as an innovation hub for maritime tech.  They also want to make the industry more environmentally friendly.

The program is highly competitive. Out of 100 applications, only 11 companies were selected.

WeWork Labs of Seattle is housing these startups and will provide programming over an accelerated 4-month period.  Participating startups will receive mentorship from Maritime Blue’s coalition of industry experts. They will get opportunities for enterprise pilots and sales. And they will leave with strong connections to the vast, global maritime industry.  The program concludes in April with a demo day, where the startups will pitch to investors and government officials.

I had the opportunity to lead the innovation accelerator’s first program session, Conducting Market Research. We covered four key research questions startups must address, and some approaches they could take.

I was struck by how quickly they were able to start helping each other. Participants generously offered insights, resources and contacts.  Because they share the same eco-system and a commitment to doing something larger for the environment, the conversations were immediately fruitful.  I have no doubt these relationships will prove valuable over time.

Come On In – The Water’s Warm(ing)!

Focusing on a single industry also brings important critical mass.  It’s heartening to see what can be accomplished when we apply tech and innovation resources to mature industries.  Innovation potential is everywhere.  And future startup accelerators should consider more approaches like this.

For a full list of participants, and more details about the program please see the Port of Seattle’s announcement here.

Photo courtesy of WeWork. Thanks to Esther Lee, WeWork Labs’ Head of Curriculum; Lauren Levy, WeWork Labs’ Operations Coordinator; and Elizabeth Scallon, WeWorks Lab Head of Northern California (SF) & Northwest.

Hal Conick wrote an enlightening and useful article, How Marketing Can Make Mergers and Acquisitions Easy, in which he referenced the AOL / Time Warner merger.  According to Conick, Time Warner executive Ted Turner said the transaction was “better than sex.” We now know, of course, that this particular merger was not successful.

Marketing topics might not rise to the top of the list of issues entrepreneurs typically think of when negotiating acquisition terms. But discussing these topics before you sign on the dotted line increases your chances of a successful acquisition.

Branding and Product Portfolio

• Which brands should you keep as stand-alone brands? Which should you rebrand, or absorb into the acquiring company’s brands? What is the basis for this decision?
• What process should you follow to ensure an orderly transition? This needs to be driven by what prospects, customers and other stakeholders require.
• Which trademarks should you keep, sell or abandon?

Marketing Strategy and Planning

• What role will the acquired company play in the overall marketing strategy of the acquiring company?
• Will the acquired company continue to operate separately, or will it be integrated into the business operations of the acquiring company? If the latter, what will this transition look like?
• Who approves final strategy? What initiatives should you continue, reexamine and change, or stop? What is the approval process for individual initiatives?
• Who controls the marketing budget going forward?

Strategic Partnerships

• Which partners should you continue to pursue under the new ownership? Do any conflict with the acquiring company’s partnerships? And if so, how should you handle the situation?
• Which relationships will change, and in what way? How can you strengthen them?
• Who owns each relationship?

Marketing Team

• Who should you keep on after the acquisition, who will need to be managed out and what would be the fairest way to do this?
• How will you need to change the roles of the remaining marketers? What possibilities are there for them to grow professionally within the new company?  And what will be necessary to retain them?
• Which outside consultants and agencies should you keep?  How should their roles change? And which should be transitioned, when and how?

Announcing the Acquisition

• Who should you notify, and what is the right process?
• What messages must you communicate to all stakeholders, including employees, customers, partners, and investors? What’s in it for them?
• What tangible actions should the company take right away to show how the acquisition delivers value?

This is a partial list based on my experience working with startups and enterprises undergoing mergers and acquisitions. The main point is to have these marketing conversations up front, to improve your chances of a successful acquisition.

Look forward to your thoughts.

This post was originally published by the American Marketing Executive Circle.

(Main photo source: Unsplash.com)

According to the organizers, FuckUp Nights is the fastest growing global movement of entrepreneurial people who come together to publicly share failure stories. Thousands of people attend FuckUp Nights each month in 200+ cities worldwide. Esquire Magazine says it’s “like TED talks with more booze and less pomp.”

When our bosses/companies/investors/society/insertyourowngrouphere ask us to be 100% successful all it does is to force us to stop taking risks and instead work to appear 100% successful. It’s unrealistic. It’s unhealthy. And it’s unproductive.

So I was tickled to see entrepreneurs come out of the closet and admit, hey, we screw up!

Why is f*cking up so important to innovation? We try more things. And we learn more.

Why Frito-Lay embraced failure

Leo Kiely, VP of Marketing at Frito-Lay in the ‘80s, used to walk around the office with a baseball bat late at night when we were all feverishly working away on our marketing projects.

He wasn’t there to beat us up. (We did that to ourselves, thank you very much.)

He was there to silently remind us that it was important to take a batting average mentality to our work. If we weren’t swinging and missing, we weren’t taking enough chances. As long as we learned from our mistakes and didn’t repeat them, we were good. To innovate, we needed to embrace mistakes as part of the process.

We celebrated our mistakes in public. When a marketer made Director, there was a mini ceremony where that person’s failures were paraded in front of the whole group for us to enjoy. The point was clear: you made Director in part because you took chances and occasionally fell flat on your face.

Frito-Lay was and is one of the most high-performance cultures in the US, and has consistently shown high financial returns – so they are doing something right.

Embracing failure is just one way to cultivate an innovation mindset – but it’s one of the most powerful.

More reading to inspire you to f*uck up

• Why Failure is the Foundation of Innovation Inc.com
• The Miracle of Making Mistakes Harvard Business Review
• How Warren Buffet taught this legendary investor the value of making mistakes CNBC

I’m going to the event in Seattle, and looking forward to making my next mistakes.

Look forward to your thoughts.

This post was originally published by the American Marketing Executive Circle.

It occurred to me that these tensions aren’t unusual. In fact, they are common.

Since many of you who thrive on innovation may at this point in your careers be considering starting your own companies – or joining a startup board – I thought it might be useful to get some advice on what can go wrong between CEOs and their boards so you can avoid these common pitfalls.

I turned to a colleague who has seen these issues from multiple sides. In his 30+ year career Robert Bismuth has served as CEO of 5 startups, as a Board Observer or Board Member of 7 startups plus 4 major industry consortiums, and advised about a dozen others. He currently serves as VP of Business Development and Strategy for STOIC, a software company based in Palo Alto, and as Director General of its hardware spinoff, SAS Fermat, based in Paris.

Bismuth was kind enough to document some of his favorites, below. Names have been omitted to spare all concerned.

4 Lethal Pitfalls

• “Helping” the CEO
• Controlling the “Baby”
• Cult of Personality versus Cult of Vision
• Dilution, Crushing and Crafting the Exit

“Helping” the CEO

Frequently members of a board will decide to “help” a CEO in her or his decision making, hiring, strategic direction, sales pipeline, brand, technical development or any of the multiple dimensions all startups struggle with as they establish themselves. Sometimes help is truly needed – even asked for. Sometimes it is not.

For example, a board may decide that a sales pipeline needs to be more robust and the issue is recruiting a VP of Sales to help the CEO develop customers. If the company’s products or services are at a suitable state of maturity then such a hire can be very useful. Typically, this would be after initial proof of concept customer engagements have led to production deployment and initial revenue.

If, however, the maturity of the company and its product/services is not yet established, this move is generally not good. It burdens the company with a significant cost in terms of executive compensation and introduces a cultural change. Frequently such a badly timed move is interpreted negatively by the CEO who takes the incoming executive as the “board’s person” and therefore trust issues develop between the CEO and his/her board.

I have seen this type of “helping” activity destroy more than one company. In one prime example, the board decided that in order to avoid losing time in the market, the company needed to develop and enterprise sales and consulting organization so that when its product was ready, it could hit the ground running.

What the board didn’t realize was that the cost of those organizations would significantly impact the overall spending of the company which forced the CEO to reduce spending on engineering. The spiral that resulted eventually caused conflict: the board blamed the CEO for overspending while the CEO distrusted the board because it had pushed forward expensive executive hires. The CEO left the company and the board eventually sold the company for pennies on the dollar.

Controlling the “Baby”

Investors typically look for companies that have a great team, excellent idea (the best being disruptive to their target markets) and a somewhat believable path to market that will eventually produce meaningful financial projections that will allow an eventual exit for early investors with a healthy return on their investment. One of the dimensions that is critical in evaluating the probability of success is the passion behind the company – particularly the passion of the CEO. Is she/he willing to sacrifice everything to see their “baby” born and then continue to sacrifice as the “baby” matures and develops?

That level of passion is truly like the passion a parent has for his or her child. Imagine a parent being told that they are doing something wrong raising their child – or worse, being threatened with having that child given to a foster parent. Good parents will do anything and everything they can to cling on to the child and bring it up “their way.”

That’s exactly the issue that rises in a company with a truly passionate founder CEO when her or his board tries to interfere with his or her vision, strategy or tactical decisions. Sometimes that interference is justified as the CEOs can – and do – lose sight of their responsibilities to their investors. After all, it is not the CEO’s money that is on the line and the board represents the investors.

In many companies the battle for control truly wreaks havoc. The board of a company holds the ultimate power in that struggle and often agonizes over whether to step in and exert control over a company that is not moving forward as expected. Sometimes the board is correct in doing that. Sometimes the board is not. A misjudgment can have disastrous results, ultimately destroying shareholder equity in when becomes a non-recoverable death spiral.

A board exerting its control of a company is never a good sign. It means something has broken in one or more areas – strategy, customer engagement, product development, fiscal responsibility, etc. Unless the board is particularly good at diplomacy, it almost always results in a breakdown in trust between company management and its board. This typically leads to two outcomes: replacing the management and/or selling the company.

In either case, the value of company decreases precipitously.

It is easy to spot companies that have endured this type of control issue: just look for companies that have had a remarkable number of CEOs within a relatively short period of time. One example is a public company which is current being sold by its board. With 10 or so years that company has had around 5 CEOs including its founder, who was brought back. The founder and his board could not decide who had control and so he left again. The current CEO is clearly not experienced enough for the job, though the board tried to pull back and let the CEO manage the company.

The result was a continued decrease in the company’s market share while burning through cash reserves. Eventually the board stepped in, however they left the CEO in place while they proceeded to get a buyer for the company. This was actually one of the few times they should have replaced the CEO but they became trapped in a logic put forward by that CEO: best leave me in place to do the deal or it will be worth less than if an acting CEO were put in place.

Again, control was muddled: sometimes the CEO has been in control and sometimes the board. In reality, when the latest CEO failed so badly, the board should have removed the CEO and put in place a temporary CEO with one goal: sell the company thereby providing the buyer with a much cleaner purchase since the buyer would not have to pay out a severance package to a poor CEO who could not successfully deal with the control issues that resulted from the board’s activities.

Cult of Personality versus Cult of Vision

Often times a founder CEO is so passionate about her or his vision that she or he drives the formation of the company through the very force of her or his personality. The initial team are frequently skilled professionals who know the CEO quite well and almost worship his or her personality. That personality becomes stamped on the initial culture of the company.

If the CEO comes in conflict with his or her board, the cult of personality issue becomes problematic: taking steps to control, aid, limit or even replace such a CEO is very risky as the entire start-up workforce is essentially there because the CEO talked them into joining and any admission of fault or shortcoming on behalf of the CEO becomes a personal issue for workers. Board who take such action do so at great peril to the company and to the shareholders they represent.

Many of the largest, most successful companies in the world were born of a cult of personality around the founder CEO – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and even old school companies such as GE, IBM, FEDEX, UPS, Intel, etc. However, in all these cases the cult of personality successfully transitioned to the cult of vision. In some cases this happened very smoothly (GE, IBM, Microsoft or Intel for example) and in some cases the transition was extremely bumpy. Apple is a prime example of a difficult transition which eventually happened but had several false starts over the preceding decades.

A good CEO seeks to move his or her company into a cult of vision. This is the only way a succession plan, or exit plan for the investors, can reliably work. If a CEO does not accept that goal or if a board moves before the goal is achieved, the result is a waste of shareholder value and ultimately the demise of the company.

I know of one start-up in which the major shareholder lost faith in the CEO and decided to remove the CEO too soon. What that shareholder failed to understand was that the majority of the company were in the mode of working for the CEO and not for the vision that the company was working to achieve. When the CEO was escorted out of the company, both the engineering and financial teams resigned completely within a week. The shareholder was left with a company that did not have a completed product and without any sense of the company’s financials.

Needless to say, that company never recovered and its assets, such as they were, disintegrated before they could even be sold.

Dilution, Crushing and Crafting the Exit

At any stage in the development of a start-up, the issue of funding, investment and exits are always on the table for a company’s current investors. When will more cash be needed? Will the company manage that through free cash flow? If more investors are needed, what terms and valuation would be offered up for attracting their capital? What’s the eventual exit strategy?

Each class of investor (Angel, VC, Corporate, etc.) has different priorities in all these (and other) dimensions. A company’s CEO also has his or her own priorities, usually starting with trying to minimize any dilutive impact on her or his equity position. CEO’s who focus on that issue will sooner or later find themselves at odds with their boards if they fail to be flexible. At the end of the day, it is a company’s board that will make such decisions and not the CEO. Company management may advise or offer opinions but the end decisions around funding, exit, etc. will be in the hands of the external directors – many of whom will possess special rights based on when and how they became an investor.

CEOs frequently get into trouble with this – particularly if they have a deteriorating relationship with their boards. One company whose board I sat on in which the CEO had lost faith in the board. This was mirrored as the board had lost faith in the CEO but was doing its best to give the CEO as much chance as possible to turn the company around. The CEO’s solution was to solicit an acquisition offer from a private equity firm which, if accepted, would have taken out the board.

The CEO was fired and a new turn around CEO brought in. It was painful for all involved. Ultimately that company was merged into a much larger concern and the investors walked away with a reasonable return.

The CEO was never able to raise sufficient investment capital for any future venture and left the private sector.

These are just some of the issues I have seen as a CEO, as a board member and as a strategic advisor to both company management and boards.

Being a CEO is a tricky thing: you have to balance your daily single minded commitment/passion for your current direction with an ability to take input and work collaboratively with those trying to help you.

Advice to new CEOs and board members

I found it fascinating to hear Bismuth’s take on this subject because usually I only get to hear from one side or the other. Here are the lessons I took from his examples – I’m sure you’ll take others as well.

When you become a CEO:

1. Understand you’ll be working for your Board, and manage up accordingly.
2. Choose your Board members carefully. Go beyond looking at their skills and networks, and check out what their communications styles are. Do they have a track record of working well with their CEO’s? How have they handled conflicts with the CEO’s they have worked with in the past?
3. Check yourself out using the same criteria 😉 Consider getting a coach if you have any concerns about your soft skills.
4. Check your ego at the door, but not your passion.
5. Actively work to build trust with your board. Determine in advance, together, how you’ll resolve your differences.

When you become a board member, the mirror image of these points apply:

1. Understand startup CEO’s may think their company is their baby and will sometimes be blinded by this. Understand how well they collaborate with others, how well they listen to advice.
2. Choose the boards you serve on carefully. How well do they function today? What conflicts are they wrestling with?
3. Think when and how to give advice, when to suggest v. when to push.
4. Actively work to build trust with your CEO and your other board members so when conflicts arise you can have safe discussions.

As Bismuth commented, many companies succeed with flexible CEOs who have managed growth well, taken their boards’ advice and allowed their “babies” to grow in paths they did not expect. Other CEOs fail in conflict with their boards.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

(Main photo source: http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-founders-are-getting-rich-before-they-exit-2014-12)