Interlude - Index of

48 | Beginnings
That’s not how our board responded. Instead, they told
us they agreed, and they promised to take action, but month
after month we would check in after board meetings and there
would be no progress. Later, one of them told me that the
strategy was to delay until the second round of VC financing.
They knew we’d be adding more investors and wanted
to include them in selecting a new CEO. Perhaps that made
sense, but I wish they had told us. It took the board eleven
months after that dinner with Bob Wall to replace Mike.
We were on pins and needles the whole time, especially after
board meetings, wondering whether Mike was still the CEO.
I thought the board was full of wimps.
••
We raised our second VC round, $6.5 million dollars, in September
1994, one year after the first round. We were fortunate
to get money from Don Valentine. No one in Silicon Valley
had a bigger Rolodex file or better experience than Valentine.
As the founder of Sequoia Capital, which had funded Apple,
Oracle, and Cisco, and was later to fund Yahoo, Google, and
YouTube, Valentine knew that good management made the
difference between success and failure, and he made the hiring
of an experienced CEO a condition of investment. I heard
secondhand that Valentine was planning to replace Mike, and
I requested a meeting to verify it myself. Valentine later told
me that I was the only founder ever to do that. He assured me
that he would replace Mike, but he warned, “Replacing a CEO
is like a heart transplant. You find out pretty quickly whether
it takes, or if there’s an immune reaction.”