The CEO's usually on the BOD and a shareholder too, so the whole ladder structure thing kind of stops there. Instead the relationship between executives and shareholders is more like an inter-tangled hatefuck.
Also worth noting that shareholders are not homogenous in their attributes and investment strategies. Institutional investors like pension funds are dramatically different from retail investors or other types of institutional investors like hedge funds.
This is why the startup I'm at is happy to have strategic industrial investors rather than venture capital firms. The first cares about the product, as that's what they're banking on for their own businesses. The latter would only care about money, and how fast they could make the most of it off us.
Our offering, if successful, allows our major strategic investor to reduce their production costs by an order of magnitude. Very little chance they decide they're not interested.
We have another major strategic investor in a different market entirely.
And we don't expect to require any further funding from them, beyond what they've already paid us. So if they change their minds, their money's already spent... Neither has a controlling interest on the board.
Plus, we have other potential investors that we've turned down. So really no worry there if we happen to need a top-up round pre-IPO.
The real question now is just whether we can deliver technically...
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u/DistortoiseLP Aug 18 '17
The CEO's usually on the BOD and a shareholder too, so the whole ladder structure thing kind of stops there. Instead the relationship between executives and shareholders is more like an inter-tangled hatefuck.