What I learned as a VC filling in as a startup CEO for 4 months

Most of the comments so far have been negative and posed with barbs for the author&#x27;s competence. I&#x27;d like to offer another angle.<p>It appears that she&#x27;s someone who didn&#x27;t come from means, put herself through college by waitressing, kept getting jobs in PE&#x2F;VC (haven&#x27;t looked up her bio as that would be creepy), and became a senior enough player at a firm to be installed as an interim-keep-the-ship-steady CEO while a new candidate was being found.<p>Job performance has a high correlation with IQ (and by extension the ability to learn quickly); especially for executive roles. The author is someone who juggles complex financial models all day; surely she&#x27;s more than smart, capable and relentlessly resourceful enough to take on the mantle of an interim CEO. Sure, she might not be a long-term candidate (for now), but an interim CEO is meant to make sure that the finances stay okay, the fires get put out, and that the ship doesn&#x27;t sink until a new skipper can be found. That&#x27;s all. It&#x27;s a job that&#x27;s not too far from her initial skills with an added operational component that she&#x27;s delving into over here. Compared to most &quot;CEOs&quot; I&#x27;ve met, she&#x27;s probably overqualified.<p>For those questioning the VC firm who sent her in, it&#x27;s impossible that she was sent in alone. She&#x27;s probably being advised by the GPs and a curated set of experts to make the right operational decisions. Her job is to execute the plan and Not Fuck Up (a harder job than it seems). And it appears that she succeeded in doing so.<p>She rose to her professional challenge, learned something and wrote something from a position of humility. How many of us (especially the detractors) can claim the same?

All: some comments below have taken a tack that&#x27;s not good for HN: seizing on one line, in which the author was obviously downplaying herself, then piling on with pedestrian indignation. That makes for lame discussion—equal parts sour and boring. The value of HN is curiosity. If you find yourself driven to post like that, please wait until curiosity is what you&#x27;re feeling instead. Then you&#x27;ll respond to something interesting in this unusual article. Or perhaps you&#x27;ll find something more interesting elsewhere. Either is fine, but piling on is for other places.<p>There&#x27;s a site guideline that covers this: &quot;<i>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize.</i>&quot; It applies to articles too.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

The writer&#x27;s a VP, won awards, worked in i-banking, and has a double bachelors from an ivy league. She&#x27;s trying to be cheeky and the first hot takes from the HN community is whoa, how <i>dare</i> they!<p>Relax, it&#x27;s a quick sunday read. Go do something nice for someone.

<i>It’s easier to be a board member than a CEO</i>.<p>Shouldn&#x27;t this be obvious?<p>A board member sleeps, has no or little personal skin in the game and is hedged across multiple ventures.<p>The CEO rarely sleeps (or has more responsibilities than time permits addressed), is &quot;all in&quot; and rarely substantially hedged, especially in early-stage startups.

Which of the 6 companies do you think Mia was CEO of [0]?<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;person&#x2F;mia-ficerai#section-jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;person&#x2F;mia-ficerai#section-jobs</a><p>Edit.<p>It is not Datavail, Weave, PresenceLearning or Envoy Global.<p>It could be Jobvite or Galvanize.

This section, I think, is <i>really</i> important and has to come from the top:<p>&quot;Interestingly the slide that seemed to resonate the most was an overview of what was <i>not</i> part of the strategy.&quot;<p>If someone can achieve that, defining what is out and get team buy in, that person is more qualified to be CEO than 80% of managers I met in my career so far.

I’m not impressed with the comments here. The author has eight years of experience in finance and was apparently the best person to fill this role despite her lack of directly relevant experience. (You might disagree, but that was the perspective of investors with a lot of skin in the game.) The article makes good points and is well written. And yet it seems half of the comments can’t get past the fact that she worked as a waitress back around the time the iPhone came out. I’m not one to cry sexism, but I’m seeing s lot of it (and perhaps some classism too) in this thread. Please do better, HN.

I don&#x27;t necessarily think accepting this kind of interim CEO thing is the worst possible call for a company sometimes, but it&#x27;s definitely not something I&#x27;d want to publicize even after the fact as the &quot;CEO&quot;, VC firm, or operating company.

&gt; Prior to this role, my “operating experience” consisted of working as a waitress during college.<p>I found this line astounding and not in good ways.<p>When a new senior person is announced (even interim), the first thing most people do is ask &quot;what has this person done?&quot; and they scour LinkedIn, writing, social media, etc to understand what they&#x27;re about and their background.<p>I&#x27;m trying to imagine senior leadership&#x27;s reaction on the initial news and during that 4 months. Even if the interim CEO busted her butt, just about the time she has an understanding in the company, team, etc, she was on the way out.

VCs without any operational experience are a major problem. This is why so many companies get advised into the overfunded death cycle and never actually build a sustainable enterprise.<p>I find it surprising that not a single one of the existing 100 employees could be temporarily promoted to the CEO role.

&quot;The company has 100+ employees, hundreds of customers, and more than 15,000 end users. I spent almost four months as CEO. Prior to this role, my “operating experience” consisted of working as a waitress during college.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll admit: I dug a bit to figure out what space the company is in, so that I can avoid using their services if it was applicable.<p>Side thought: It&#x27;d be interesting to do a bizarro &quot;Undercover Boss&quot; where you make someone without any experience the CEO of a large company for a week.

This is the strangest thing I&#x27;ve read today.<p>At so many levels.<p>Really really weird.<p>I wonder if the author&#x27;s LinkedIn now says &quot;Acting CEO&quot; at company blah, thereby qualifying them for some full CEO role somewhere as a next career step.

This could almost pass for satire.

sooooo many questions..

&quot;The company has 100+ employees, hundreds of customers, and more than 15,000 end users. I spent almost four months as CEO. Prior to this role, my “operating experience” consisted of working as a waitress during college. My entire professional career has been in finance, where I have worked in small, flat organizations with a project-driven, deal team-oriented model. In short, I had no idea what to expect, and I learned a lot, quickly.&quot;<p>Why on earth was this person in any way shape or form the person to step in?<p>Once of the C-level people should have, or someone in the VC&#x27;s network.<p>&quot;In the CEO role it quickly becomes obvious that empathy and compassion are far more valuable than financial acumen. &quot;<p>Yes, but understanding the product, customers, operational details, and knowing where to direct the system is probably more important than &#x27;empathy and compassion&#x27;.<p>&quot;It’s easier to be a board member than a CEO&quot;<p>Who doesn&#x27;t already know this?<p>My crusty comments aside, it&#x27;s a good read.

I don&#x27;t see any problem here. Investors control the company. If they want to hire Micky Mouse to run it, so be it.<p>The bigger issue is that the article is non-transparent.<p>What company? Why CEO left? What was achieved during those 4 months?

Instead of suggesting better suited person for the role, I believe we should consider this as yet another example of reality where CEOs do not really influence outcome of the company, especially once it has grown to 100+ employees. Most of the points in the article (&quot;insights&quot;) are buzzword filled generic Markov chain generated advice that you can find in pretty much any other book or website.<p>I would bet a certain amount of money that if they hired an actual waitress, the results would not have been worse and, most probably, better.