After booting their founder to hire a “professional CEO” and raising over $100M, Canadian startup Bench suddenly shuts down
Get your popcorn because things are definitely going to get interesting over the next few weeks as we learn what the heck was really going on over at Bench. My feed on X was flooded yesterday with tweets showing an email Bench sent to customers completely out of the blue, here’s the email:
And yes, this email was sent three days before the end of the year, and you’re reading it right, access to the platform was immediately turned off. This left many Bench users with a less-than-ideal holiday week, and X quickly became flooded with tweets about the move…
Ana’s tweet above is in response to a tweet from Ian Crosby, the original founder of Bench who was booted by the board in favor of a “professional CEO to take the company to the next level.” Ian shared his thoughts on both X and LinkedIn, here’s the full post:
I think it’s great that Ian decided to speak up and the last line in his post is one that hopefully will get cemented in the heads of more VCs and boards:
I hope the story of Bench goes on to become a warning for VCs that think they can “upgrade” a company by replacing the founder. It never works.
Now there are a lot of questions to be answered. Bench had a 500 person team, did they all just suddenly lose their jobs? And why cut off access to the platform instantly, over the holidays? While you can export your data, anyone that was working on anything accounting-related at the end of the year, using Bench, now has to load all of their data into a new system…why not leave access on for people for at least a month?
But I think for many people, the burning question is why is a company, that raised over $100M, with 500+ employees and likely thousands of customers, not worth anything? Like Anand says below, “a zero value here is wild”
This is what is so puzzling to me, and makes me wonder if we’re going to find out that something nefarious was going on at Bench. The reality is, how would the customer base and software not be worth anything?
I think it’s safe to say Contour Ventures knows the answer, and I would be shocked if someone over there doesn’t end up sharing more over the coming months.
Of course, I’m not pointing the finger at Contour, I don’t know the history, all I know is what I’ve been reading over the last 24-hours, from the original founder of Bench and all the other people who have chimed in on X. What I do know is that the board made a move to remove the founder of the company, after that the company raised $60M, and then poof, disappeared into thin air.
It does seem like Shopify Ventures, which was part of the $60M Series C round was not a fan of removing the founder, as Tobi, the founder of Shopify had this to say about the sudden shuttering of Bench:
I thought the last sentence in Tobi’s tweeet was interesting…
too many such stories in Canada
This would seem to imply that Canada sees VCs/boards replace founders with “professional CEO’s” moreso than in the US. I don’t know much about the startup ecosystem in Canada but if this is true, something tells me this will serve as a lesson and potential catalyst of a behavior change in the future.
Over the next few weeks I’m sure we’ll learn more about why Bench shut down so suddenly and it seems likely that the members of the board who made this terrible move will also come to light.
For now, it’s a sad day for the hundreds of hard working people at Bench, who probably had no idea they were suddenly going to lose their job…and the thousands of customers who never thought something like this could happen in a million years.
If someone puts together a spreadsheet of the people who lost their jobs and are looking for work I will update this post to include it. While it can be easy to focus on the core lesson here and shame the board that made this move, it’s important to remember the human impact — there are people really suffering now by terrible decision making.
I am so sorry to all the employees at Bench, I can’t imagine what a difficult and confusing time this must be. Hopefully we can bind together as a community and help everyone land on their feet.
