What's The Cost Of Becoming "Investable"?

I’ll be honest, I never thought about governance for one second with my last company. I did what I thought investors wanted me to do. I did what was needed to get funded. And at the time, I thought that was the right move. But knowing what I know now, optimizing solely for investors is a low-leverage move. It’s like sprinting all out for the first mile in a marathon. It’s no mistake that I couldn’t even get past the first leg of the race. And even if I were able to stay in longer, the chances of getting fired, selling to a suboptimal buyer, or just burning out due to perverse corporate incentives are high. The road to building a generational company is filled with booby traps. The first booby trap is doing everything investors think you should do, or more so, ignoring what you actually want to do for the sake of becoming “investable”.

I’ve recently been doing some work on what it looks like for founders to truly go the distance. It looks a lot like founders doing things their way. It looks a lot like prioritizing the mission over everything else. It looks a lot like taking a stance, and making decisions that optimize the chances of the mission being accomplished, even if it means saying goodbye to easy money.

“Mission” has historically been a soft word. What does being “mission-driven” mean, or what does it truly mean to be a missionary? These words are soft, high level, and no one has a uniform definition of what they mean. But, through trial and error, there is actually a way to make your “mission” concrete and use it as a business asset. There is a way to embed it into your company’s DNA. There is a way to make it easy to say no to an ethically bankrupt buyer who wants to acquire your company for a share price higher than your last valuation. There is a way to set up your company to attract true believers and to detract rent-seekers.

And by doing this, you magically clear up many of the booby traps. You find you have the wind pushing you at your back, not against your chest. And you’ll find that everyone you are surrounded by all wants the same thing, aligned by the mission, philosophically and legally. And if that means saying no to some transactional investors at the beginning of the journey who don’t understand the concept of long-term value creation, I’d say that’s worth it.