Here is the balance of the survey responses from the VC-backed CEO survey we administered at the end of December 2008 into the first week of January 2009, both responses and a bit of interpretation.
Given survey responses, it appears the bell curve peak is in the 20-40% reduction in headcount. The group of CEOs who indicated these reductions were approximately half of the 60 CEO respondents.
Winner on this question was "more than 9 months," with more than 40% of the CEOs. Runners-up were the "0-to-6 months of cash" CEOs, evenly split with 25% saying 3 to 6 months, and another 25% saying "less than 3 months." What this may indicate is that there is a bimodal distribution of funding in the market --those who are well-funded, with 9 months or more, and those companies who are running out of cash (popular definition = less than 6 months of cash remaining). This is reinforced by the fact that very few companies responded that they had 7-9 months of cash (less than 10% of companies). Therefore, one might imagine that those companies who are shortest on cash are also those who are making the deepest cuts in staffing. In addition, that there may be another round of cuts in store for those low-cash companies if they can't get another round closed soon.
Top implied answer here? Don't raise a venture round in 2009. And this is what the largest slug of CEOs responded with (33%). Of those who are going to try to raise in 2009
Winner for this question shows some great optimism however, with about 1/3 each of the CEOs responding answering with either "revenues up 1 to 25%" or "Up more than 50%."
There was an intentional effort to get a fairly even distribution of venture-backed CEO respondents for this survey, to try to avoid sector bias. We were fortunate to have at least 10% (6 or more companies) from each of life sciences / biotech, medical devices, and the cleantech sectors. Software/Internet/telecom was the largest category represented, with 42% of CEOs hailing from this sector.
Q: If YOU could survey your peer CEOs, what question(s) are both urgent AND important to running your business you'd like us to consider asking in future polls?
This was one of the most rewarding questions for which to see the responses. Fully half of the CEOs polled had a question they'd like to pose to their peers, and some CEOs had several. Below is a partial list of questions we'll choose from in follow-on surveys. If any of those CEOs would like to respond individually to any of the questions below, feel free to post a comment on this blog entry and we'll post it for public consumption (clustered by general question subcategory as well as by industry sector). Of course, the winning question asked by one of you CEOs, just to validate that venture capital-backed CEOs are-if anything-self-aware, pragmatic, and not fatally over-optimistic: "What will CEOs do if their company fails?!"
1. Cost-related questions
2. Sales/Marketing/Revenue-related questions
3. Funding/exit/valuation questions
4. Board of Directors/investor-related questions
5. Staffing/talent questions
6. Economy-related questions
There a few industry-specific questions CEOs wanted to ask their peer as well:
Life sciences/biotech-related questions
Medical devices-related questions