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Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

> Prior to this role, my “operating experience” consisted of working as a waitress during college.

I found this line astounding and not in good ways.

When a new senior person is announced (even interim), the first thing most people do is ask "what has this person done?" and they scour LinkedIn, writing, social media, etc to understand what they're about and their background.

I'm trying to imagine senior leadership's reaction on the initial news and during that 4 months. Even if the interim CEO busted her butt, just about the time she has an understanding in the company, team, etc, she was on the way out.

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This is not uncommon in the PE/LBO world; often “turnaround CEOs” are finance professionals who essentially act as lieutenants for the GPs rather than independent executives. The real problem is when those people then go back into the world thinking of themselves as temporarily embarrassed CEOs; few of them who leave PE (based entirely on my anecdotal experience, to be sure) go on to be effective c-suite leaders. Totally wrong personality, decisionmaking, and execution profiles.

And they’d see she works at a VC firm and is a board member / observer at many companies. Seems reasonable, especially given the lack of experience of many startup CEOs anyway.

A few points:

1. This is a great way for Catalyst to get a potential rising star some operational experience in a low-risk situation (lots of other Catalyst people apparently involved, short timeline, etc.)

2. She said she was involved with the company since their investment (which, if it is PresenceLearning as others said, was 3+ years ago), and has been a board member either since that time, or for a while.

3. Senior leadership probably all knew her or at least of her, given her involvement as an investor.

4. I think the waitress line is a throwaway to try to be humble and build rapport with readers. Working in VC/PE is useful for keeping a company going from an operational perspective.

How many SV startups are founded by recent college grads? Quite a few. I agree that it's not really that positive a thing, but it's certainly not atypical.

I 100% agree except that this isn't day one where they're still figuring out the basics and where the bathrooms are. From the article:

> The company has 100+ employees, hundreds of customers, and more than 15,000 end users.

That's out of context, isn't it? What does the next sentence say?

You mean this:

> My entire professional career has been in finance, where I have worked in small, flat organizations with a project-driven, deal team-oriented model.

Which is immediately followed by:

> In short, I had no idea what to expect, and I learned a lot, quickly.

This wasn't 3 people working on building v0.1 or early customer discovery. This was a 100+ person company with some momentum.

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