Pablo Brenner & Sergio Fogel Blog

We´ve been reading a lot about Steve Jobs during the last days, and today everybody agrees about his genius and the great impact his return to Apple had.

But lets face it, most of the VCs (me included) will always ask the entrepreneur: “will you be ready to bring professional management to the company when the time comes?”, both the entrepreneur and the VC know that what the VC is really asking is “will you be ready to step down as CEO once the company reaches a certain size”, or on Apple terms: “will you (Steve Jobs) accept to bring John Sculley as the CEO and let him fire you”?

So here is my plea to VCs, stop asking that, and more important to the entrepreneurs, please answer what you really feel: “Of course not!, I will not accept to leave the company and leave it to be run by a professional manager, because the company will lose the vision and the soul”

There may be some exceptions (like J. Chambers in Cisco), but in most of the startups I know (including Alvarion which is close to my heart), bringing a “professional CEO” ends up converting the company in a walking dead, without soul, or like  Sculley´s Apple without Steve Jobs.