PRE-IPO's; False Representation

Beware, many Pre-IPO's falsely represent themselves to their clients, the
investment community, so much so, they begin to believe in their own lies.

>From falsely representing processes and procedures to misrepresentation of
their products. Pre-Ipo's are also getting the reputation of violating about
every known labor law. The creation of hostile work environments comes with
the turf. Employees at many levels are afraid to speak the truth, even when
placed in from of potential investors, or user community, as they have been
prepared by their management to embellish the story or lose their job.
Pre-IPO's are also plagued with sons, daughters, cousins, uncles and more,
sprinkled about, such that if you are managing your bosses daughter, son,
cousin etc,. you are exposed immediately to a hostile work environment. I
saw a man lose his job, just two weeks after he disciplined his bosses fat,
short, chubby, whining daughter.

During my career, I have been involved in several due diligence situations
where my company was either targeted to be purchased, desired to acquire
additional capital, or were engaged in due diligence while pursuing
expansion.

While involved in the receiving end, it has been my experience, the due
diligence process was driven by and heavily focused on, financial
information.   I did not see similar expertise in delving into the core
underlying business and operational processes.  Process analysis, when
performed, was done so,  in my opinion, superficially and accomplished
largely, by interviewing senior operations management well versed in
representing their processes, quality foundations, current and planned
initiatives, all in the most favorable light, such that it actually appeared
better than it was.

The result for the investor, is a less than favorable ROI, whereabouts, a
more thorough examination of underlying, often subtle and overlooked issues
and nuances would result in better defining how the investment is used or
structured, if awarded at all.

For example, a Pre-IPO in Georgia, an ASP offering a procurement platform,
convinced their user community and investors, they had a quality assurance
program, where in all actuality, one did not exist. They went as far as
hiring a person to paper build processes and procedures, present to the user
community and investors, and when convinced the presentation represented
enhancements to existing processes, they released the one hired and returned
to business as usual. Writing code, pushing it to production servers,
letting customers, unknowingly find the problems, report them angrily to
their Help Desk and then fix the reported problem on the fly...., real time.
No compatibility testing, no usability testing, no load testing, no
functional testing, no regression testing. A software product without QA,
it's absurd. Problems are blamed on the help desk, and not the ego freak,
head of engineering.

Nonetheless, this company received additional funding, as the NY based
investment firm, did a poor job investigating the truth behind the
presentations of skilled bullshit artist. Had the investors really spent
more time asking better questions and looking only slightly deeper, they
would have found unhappy employees and in a short time would have found the
root to that unhappiness. The root having been employees desiring to do the
"right" thing. To do a quality job, but threatened by job loss to do a
substandard job and lie about it.

Beware!!!!