Protecting And Maintaining Control Over Your Startup: A Note To Founders

Introduction

As startups scale, founders often face a harsh reality—losing control and ownership of the company they birthed to external factors like investors and funding endeavors. In some instances, the loss of control is so profound that founders are ousted from the very enterprises they helped build. Donald Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, a leading venture capital firm, noted that about half of the founding CEOs of their investments are fired within 18 months of their series A funding. Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder at OpenAI, recently joined the list of founding CEOs like Steve Jobs – Apple; Travis Kalanik – Uber; Jack Dorsey – Twitter, who were all sacked by the board of their respective companies, even though he was reinstated due to shareholder pressure and employee uproar,