After Some Careful Consideration, Our Family is Pivoting and Becoming a VR Startup

Dear Family,

Please have a seat. Thank you for joining us today for our first official shareholders meeting. As you might’ve seen in the memo I attached to our dog’s collar this morning, we will be referring to our nightly family dinners as “shareholders meetings” from now on.

This past weekend, your mother and I embarked on a leadership retreat in the wilderness to assess our family’s strengths, weaknesses, and pretty-good-ats. Although we’ve made some decent memories and had a few laughs along the way, this family hasn’t been financially viable for quite some time. Between Steven’s clarinet lessons and Jodie’s SAT tutoring, our burn rate is extremely high. If we want to turn this ship around and generate any sort of profitability and growth in Q4, we’ll need to pivot hard and fast.

That is why, starting today, we will be restructuring our focus from being a loving, suburban family to being a lean, cutthroat virtual reality software company. Trust us, it’s the right move for our family at this time.

The traditional vestiges of our family like board game night and S’more Sundays are simply not going to cut it in today’s competitive business landscape. In order to be reborn as a sleek, profitable phoenix, our family structure must first die. We will evolve, even if that means suddenly abandoning our functional home life in lieu of a new environment where we play ping-pong and use the word “disrupt” constantly.

We didn’t start a family because we were trying to succeed or hit some underlying financial metrics. But, if we had been, there’s no way to look at our family as anything but a financial disaster. We haven’t made a profit since the garage sale of Q3 2012! Our numbers are bleak and the current familial model doesn’t offer us any escape from the red.

It’s time to hit the delete button on every warm, pleasant routine that’s given you an emotionally stable upbringing thus far. No more piling into the minivan and singing Disney songs as we drive to support Steven at his football games. No more birthday breakfasts for Jodie where we all split a huge pile of heart-shaped pancakes. Most importantly, no more swear jar in the living room where you have to put in a dollar if you swear in the house. Profanity is the bedrock of a winning startup culture. We’re going to be doing a lot more swearing in this family.

As it stands, your mother and I know very little about the world of virtual reality software. However, that will not stop us from immediately and drastically dismantling the core structure of our family in order to build a VR company. Some of the greatest companies of all time started in residential garages with nothing but a dream and a willingness to exploit the goodwill of various family members. Also, please no longer to refer to your mother and me as “Mom” and “Dad.” VR is your mom and dad now.

We understand this change won’t come easy. You’ve worked so hard to exist as a regular suburban family and now you’re suddenly tasked with creating and scaling some of the most innovative software of our time. We want you to take the passion you have for things like doing your homework and playing Scrabble, and instead, apply it to creating virtual reality experiences for our customers.

We believe deeply in our new mission to create and sell VR software out of our four-bedroom home. All we need is for you to believe in our family’s potential to no longer be a family and instead be a VR startup. A supportive home environment is the past. Virtual reality is the future.