Audrey Musgrave! What question should i ask a startup company who is going
through b round of funding should i be concerned
about the company staying afloat awesome question i'm gonna give you a
couple things here
number one i gave you so i gave you four categories of company
types and what's going to happen as a result
of covid19 right the coronavirus is going to affect
different companies a different way so i'm not going to
recap all what i said a few minutes ago check check that out zip back to that
and figure out which one of the four you're in
now what questions should you be asking a startup company
so i'm gonna give you i'm gonna give you uh i could go all day on this one
and this and i think for those of you that saw the me demo that very quickly
the how to evaluate small to medium-sized companies that specialty
session that i showed you in there that's exactly what this is
and and for companies that are in the infancy stages or small
organizations that are privately held or medium-sized companies that are
privately held or even large companies that's just good tactical stuff
but for startups here is your acid test for startups the the thing that i am
most concerned about so let's just say um let's just say audrey's sake of
argument that one of the four categories you were in
the one the first two categories that i mentioned
that they they were just they were either already equipped to go remotely
and they slid on over when covet 19 came and they were business as usual
okay or they are in a good industry might not have been set up to operate
remotely however i would imagine startups that are coming to fruition
right now are all pretty much most of them are going to be equipped to
operate remotely all right so let's say we give you the benefit of the doubt
now move forward to when you start evaluating startups
the single greatest question you could ever
ask to a startup company is can you explain to me
what your goals are for the next few years
three years let's say maybe three to five
tell me which goals are i could conduct i almost don't need to ask any
other question to know if i'm going to want to work there
why would i be so confident if i ask that question and based on
that answer alone would i know that this would be a good company or not now maybe
i'm exaggerating for effect but go with me on this
when you ask and i'm talking about the executives in a startup okay
now i'm talking about the ceo and the ceo and the cfo
and and i'm talking about the big dogs if if
they're going to answer you one of a couple ways if they say
our goal is in the next three to f four or five years to build this up and
then sell it i'm out i'd get up and walk out right
then no exaggeration i literally would
because that's their mentality that's how
they're going to run their business and their focus is going to be on all
the wrong stuff and they're going to build a crappy
company that isn't going to sell and they're going to let a lot of people
go because they're not growing fast enough okay
now the people who are giving them the money
they're going to want to return except that the only way to ensure that that
return is going to be there is to build a solid organization that's
focused on whoever its customers are and making sure that
they are building the best in business best in class best in
industry best in the world whatever at what they're doing okay if that is
not their goal they will not put a solid company together and remember something
that you are not going to benefit financially
nearly as much as the people who took all the risk to actually start this up
they already have series a funding right so they owe somebody maybe that's
themselves or maybe it's somebody else an angel investor
okay now i'm going to get b round well the train's already kind of moving and
then the c round will come right but i'm telling you if their focus is
solely their ebitda your you need to run because they will do things that will
constantly be in odds with
uh building a stable company because think about it i
have to constantly balance the profit or the revenue or the whatever and the
easiest way to right gain profit is you get more
revenue but for startups that's hard right so what do they do they have to be
really smart with the costs well what happens if the revenue is not
growing as fast as they want what do they do
they get rid of costs they get rid of people that's the easiest way to do that
and the fastest way to cut the fat in their mind
when somebody who's building an organization that's going to build the
best customer service based on the best product and all that
good stuff has to be building for a little bit of a long term and that
has to be their focal point because the best organizations that then
are bought up sold or go public all have that solid
foundation underneath them at least nowadays that was not always
the case when you go back to like the tech bubble in 2001
so what are your goals if they say to you
well the first thing is we've got to build a solid company we've got to build
a best in class product and the way i see
us doing that is this and then yeah you know what we are
taking on investors we investors do want to get paid back i am
i am doing this hoping that there will be financial
reward at the end but i know that if i focus on
this it'll be there then you're in right then i then i know what i'm gonna
ask them if that's their philosophy it's probably gonna be pretty good it
will but that's that's i mean for startups like that
ought to be like number one first question don't ask
about the role i want to know what your what your goal
is what your strategy to get there is what you see the obstacles being what
will you do if there's a lot of that so then you
want to start getting into what are those challenges what are
the known challenges what do you what do you think are unknown and so on
and you want to go through that line i would not even care what my job would be
until i got all that out the way so that's where i would
i'd be way over in that direction i hope that helps that's great question