10 best ways to burn capital

Sometimes seeing how best to achieve the opposite of what you want to achieve can help you to clarify what you should do:

10 best ways to burn capital

Hire a complete set of senior managers ASAP after forming your company. The great thing about senior managers is that they will want to hire other managers and you will end up with more layers of management to spend money on! Hire the senior managers from large companies. They are even more inclined to spend money on additional management layers as well as many different staff functions. Locate your team in an expensive city. Your staff will need more cash comp to live, so your salaries will be higher. Also, your rent (and everything else) will be higher! Ramp up your staff quickly in anticipation of high demand. Your current staff will spend more of their time recruiting and training (lowering productivity) and your new staff will have a lower utilization as well. If you do this really well, you will build a long-term culture of not being productive that will last through all phases of your company’s evolution. Use your marketing resources on branding and try to brand what you don’t have. Focussing your marketing efforts on lead generation and product marketing will have too much capital efficiency to meet your goal of burning capital. Use your sales resources on field sales and large company partnerships. These are the activities that cost the most and take the longest to turn into revenues. Activities like telemarketing, inside sales, and developing the natural business partners are too capital efficient! Put a large development team in place and then focus your development staff on the core technology and ignore the packaging and UI considerations…then hire some professional services, training, and customer service staff to help your customers implement, configure, train, and resolve issues. Do not hold staff meetings or company-wide meetings or other communication methods to help focus your team (e-mail, IM, etc.). This will create too much clarity and resolve too many questions. Get backing from 2 or more VCs with very large funds…the larger the better! They have a need to deploy more capital and will own more of your company over time, so will be less resistant to these ideas. Never, ever, ever put in place management systems such as budgeting, metric management, or incentive systems that drive the right activities. If you do put in place the management systems, be sure not to focus them on the key drivers of your business.

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