“Let's have some new clichés.” Samuel Goldwyn
"Its all about the team"
I was not going to bore you to death, honest!... but the VC's cliché has its merits: No one knows at the starting line how and where the venture might end up - so it is all about the team.
You may experience a 180º pivot, explosive growth, employees recruitment or change, partnership management - sometimes with the proverbial 200 pound gorilla. It is a constant struggle to find your sweet spot so you can generate revenues before you get stuck in some roadside ditch...
Tough it will get, and the toughest will need to get going - That's the executive for you.
Take your CTO: She thought the system would run on AWS, with two load balancers, and an instance of mySQL, when BAM!... the CEO seals a deal with Azure, and the code will be rewritten (deadlines won't budge, though).
Or, consider your COO: Team grew up two, and then four, fold in six months, and now a third of the staff have to go (we changed the whole infrastructure just one paragraph above, remember?). He now must find new offices, cancelling or subletting the acres reserved just weeks before.
Your financial team has to, all this time, do their thing with the financial modeling - constantly changing predictions - When will you generate profit? When you just have to obtain more funding? How many programmers can you afford now, and how in two months time?
The list goes on, and the mettle of your executives will be tested, time and again. That's the missing part of the PoC - the resilience to operational change.
For further information about design and implementation of POCs, contact me at yoel@theroadtlv.com
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