Managing different investor priorities, objectives, and incentives is one of the most difficult things to do when leading a company. I wrote about the importance of understanding your investor's context and incentives a while back. Even at the venture stage, your angel investors and VCs may have very different ideas on how they define a good outcome. Depending on their own situation, some may be taking a very long-term view of the investment; others may want a shorter-term win. This intensifies significantly as you transition into the growth stage and, ultimately, an IPO, at which point you can literally have millions of investors with competing needs and priorities.

To help manage this, someone once told me that in a board meeting, I should try very hard to step out of my own incentives and not behave on behalf of Brian Manning but instead behave on behalf of the company. The company has no voice. Everyone in the room has their own incentives and that's typically what they represent. It's important for someone to step up and speak for the company.

This sounds like great advice, but it's almost impossible to do because how does one define the incentives of the company when the incentives are really a bundle of competing self-interests? This makes driving investor alignment extremely difficult.

As a leader, your job is to maximize shareholder value, but on what timeline? Should you optimize valuation for a year from now or 3 to 5 years from now? Depending on your answer, your short-term goals and actions will vary significantly. You might say your job is to drive value over the long term. But what is the long term? Should companies seek to stay in business forever at the cost of shorter-term returns?

In the early stages, to help manage this, I've found it's enormously useful to optimize around funding rounds — seed, Series A, B, C, etc. Leaders should set specific goals associated with the next raise. As an example, a team at a high-growth startup might say they want to raise their Series A in December of 2025, and by that point, they want to have:

$X in the bank
$X in revenue
$X in monthly burn rate
X% growth
X in headcount
X in number of customers
X, Y, and Z in product milestones
$X in company valuation (this one will obviously be a loose estimate based on some market-driven multiple)
X gross margin, Y operating margin (though these should be prioritized after product/market fit, burn rate, and cash are more of the focus early on)

Leadership should then be transparent with the board and investors about these metrics so everyone knows what the company is chasing. Leaders and even front-line employees should know these metrics and keep them top of mind. While this approach is far from perfect and won't align all of the different competing interests, transparency and disciplined tracking against clear metrics is a huge step forward in managing the day-to-day tradeoffs and difficult decisions that come with running a company.