I hate seeing this very thing play out in real time, but I find it particularly sad when investors and VCs then takeover the board and outmaneuver the founders and Csuite to the point they barely run the company anymore. They take advantage of technical founders without the board level chops to do this. Then short term focus or otherwise misaligned incentives mean the board slowly, but unknowingly, runs the company into the ground. (by doing stuff like hiring a bunch of marketing people while the technical debt starts piling sky high...)