Dear Startups:  Here’s How to Stay Alive
So the above is obviously written through a VC lens. Through an entrepreneur&#x27;s lens - who also survived the dot-com bust (at etoys.com) and has since run several failed and now successful businesses -  I&#x27;d add the following:<p>The most valuable advice in this post reminds me of Marc A&#x27;s awesome blog entry. Quote:<p>&quot;Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a &quot;not winning&quot; problem.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmarchive.com&#x2F;guide_to_big_companies_part2.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmarchive.com&#x2F;guide_to_big_companies_part2.html</a><p>In my opinion winning is, ultimately, measured by how much cash you can generate. We stopped thinking about an exit a long time ago while in the deepest darkest part of the valley of the shadow of startup death. We were forced to do it because we ran out of money and no one cared about us. Then we started focusing completely on our customers and our income statement. As soon as we did that, amazing things started happening.<p>Cash, in this case and in this climate, is king. Or net income to be specific. If you&#x27;re able to generate large amounts of cash and keep a lot of it, not a heck of a lot else matters. From my perspective the only problems that really remain is giving your team a great quality of life and serving your customers.<p>Cash takes away issues like the board bugging you, investors breathing down your neck or (worst case) wanting to play CEO, hiring problems, retention problems, funding, what business are we in problems, product problems (you&#x27;re obviously killing it, so do more of that!), exec hires, issues with rebellious execs (you&#x27;re killing it, so you&#x27;re implicitly right) etc.<p>When you &quot;go for growth&quot; (numbers growth, not revenue) you give up all of the above and put yourself as a CEO or exec in a precarious position. Your arguments are no longer that defendable because growth means jack shit unless it generates cash or will very clearly ultimately generate cash.<p>Think about the CEO of Giphy who just raised something like $50M at something like a $300M valuation. It&#x27;s like my wife and co-founder says: Doing that you turn a cash problem into a much bigger cash problem. I&#x27;d add that you also now have less equity and less influence. For the investors it&#x27;s awesome - the biz will likely bulk up on talent and worst case will exit as a talent acquisition at $2M per engineer and the investors (who get paid first) will recover perhaps everything that way with little left over.<p>If I was early stage in this environment I&#x27;d do the following:<p>Stop dreaming about a Deus ex Machina that will reach down and save your sorry ass. Stop fantasizing about acquisitions. If you don&#x27;t you&#x27;re going to inadvertently turn acquirers into your target market instead of your real customers. And humans aren&#x27;t good at focusing on two goals at once.<p>Then do absolutely everything you can to generate sustainable cash. Usually this means (if you&#x27;re early stage) discovering who your customers are and what business you&#x27;re in or (if you&#x27;re later stage) serving the heck out of your customers and making sure that what you provide is worth more than each dollar they spend to acquire it. Then do more of that. If you&#x27;re successful doing this, rather than raising money, you&#x27;ll notice that the really big scary problems simply go away.