“But we’re a startup!”
“That’s not enough anymore. How will you become profitable?”
This is the essence of discussions between startups and their VC funders today and increasingly between big companies and their shareholders. Unfortunately, Ford’s CFO didn’t get the memo because he is still trying to pass off their $3 billion loss on electric vehicles with the “consider-us-a-startup” excuse.
Increased shareholders’ attention is also forcing all the big tech companies to kill off many of their loss-making projects that do not have any path to profitability, with an accompanying bloodbath of firings.
An audit showed that 47 of the 98 Danish municipalities were running AI projects. Two of these had provided value.
Do you have realistic business cases behind your projects? Or is the business case a collection of rosy assumptions retrofitted onto a project someone just wanted to do? It is better to find and kill vanity projects than to be called to the CEO’s office to explain why you are frittering away the company’s money. Contact me if you want an independent outside opinion on your project portfolio.