How to Get to Cash Flow Positive

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Atriac went out of business, which made it impossible for us to raise any money. We were about six days away from fronting, soing 50 million dollars. And we had to disclose immediately that we'd lost our large customer,. As soon as we disclosed it, we lost 50 % of our market cap and we couldn't raise the money.

In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason’s experience at Lytro, and beyond, a common theme emerges: a CEO’s job is lonely in these moments and the hardest thing about a big pivot or change might be in finding the courage to make the decision in the first place.