Reducing Founder Departure Risk

Harry Stebbings mentions some key ways investor returns are getting crushed in the AI era.

On his number one point 'Investment Where the Founder Leaves, I Write It to Zero', I'll add:

There are ways of significantly reducing the likelihood of founders leaving - mostly by getting deep alignment on the founders' goals and their teams.

Unless the founder is colossally bored (different problem), you can usually take the time to understand what their bottlenecks/concerns/desires are and leverage their team to get through those issues. We leverage their team by taking the time to understand what their gripes are, where processes are breaking down, or even whether or not it still makes sense for them to be going after the same market with the same product.

In my experience there is ton of hidden gold in teams that remains entirely untapped, while the ship sinks.

It doesn't have to be this way.

On his second point, also important: '[We relay on the idea that] any of our companies can actually hire A* talent when they are competing against the might of compensation packages from OpenAI and Anthropic'

You'll want to make sure your talent is being hired into a Sales, Product and Engineering machine that can take sub-A* talent and turn it into quality, delivered product that your customers love.

This starts with good interviewing, aligning incentives, and having a process to place your new team members in. Again, deep alignment.

DM me if your founders are struggling.