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What Is a Fractional COO — And When Do You Actually Need One?
The COO title has always been ambiguous. In large companies it often describes a president-in-waiting, a chief of staff with operating authority, or a functional leader elevated to the C-suite. In growth-stage companies, it usually means something more specific: the person who runs the inside of the business while the CEO runs the outside. The fractional version of that role has grown significantly as companies have become more willing to hire senior operating talent part-tim
MG
Mar 43 min read
Change Management During a Transaction: The Internal Story Nobody Tells
Every transaction has two narratives running simultaneously. The external one — the story told to investors, buyers, the press, the market — gets enormous attention. The internal one — what leadership tells the organization, when, and how — gets almost none. This is a mistake with real costs. Key employees leave during deal processes. Integration failures begin before the documents are signed. Culture damage that takes years to repair starts in the silence between announcemen
MG
Mar 34 min read
Org Design for Growth-Stage Companies: When to Restructure and Who to Cut
Growth creates organizational debt. The structure that worked at 10 people doesn't work at 40. The roles that made sense when you were figuring out the product become constraints when you need to scale the business. And the people who were right for one stage of the company are sometimes wrong for the next. Nobody likes talking about this. But the founders who manage organizational transitions well — who make these decisions deliberately rather than reactively — build more du
MG
Mar 34 min read
What Investors Find in Diligence — And What Kills Deals
Every founder who has been through a capital raise or M&A process has a story about what came up in diligence. Most of them are preventable. Some of them are fatal. All of them are less damaging when you know they're coming. Having sat on both sides of the table — running diligence as an investor and preparing companies for it as an advisor — here is an honest account of what actually gets found, and what actually kills deals. What investors are actually looking for The purpo
MG
Mar 23 min read
SaaS Thoughts (October)
aaas layoffs, demand, b2b, venture-backed, venture capital, competition, Michael porter, profit, federal reserve, saas, salesforce
MG
Oct 31, 20221 min read
The 2021 Peak: A Case Study in Speculative Excess
The peak of the 2020 to 2021 speculative cycle will be studied in future editions of Kindleberger the way the South Sea Bubble and the dot-com peak are studied in current ones: as a unusually well-documented case of euphoria, where the evidence of excess is preserved in SPAC prospectuses, venture term sheets, crypto white papers, and the social media commentary of the participants in real time. What made 2021 unusual, even by the standards of speculative manias, was the simul
Mar 63 min read
Kindleberger's Anatomy of a Bubble: A Field Guide for the Present Moment
Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes, first published in 1978 and updated through five editions, is the most useful book ever written about financial bubbles — not because it provides a predictive model but because it provides a diagnostic one. Kindleberger, drawing on Minsky's theoretical framework and his own deep knowledge of financial history, described the anatomy of a speculative mania with enough precision that subsequent bubbles can be mapped onto his sc
Mar 63 min read
Minsky Was Right: The Financial Instability Hypothesis and Why Stability Is Destabilizing
Hyman Minsky spent most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis largely ignored by mainstream economics, which had concluded — with the confidence that precedes most large intellectual mistakes — that financial markets were self-stabilizing and that the business cycle had been tamed. Minsky argued the opposite: that financial stability is itself destabilizing, that the longer a period of economic calm persists the more fragile the financial system becomes, and tha
Mar 63 min read
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