Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 1, 2014

Supportive co-founder and executive positions. Member of the Advisory Board. Every startup needs two or three key advisors who have the domain experience, connections, and complementary skills to guide the founders through those early crises. Manage customer service. Personnel Manager.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

Thus I was happy to see a recent book, “ The Tech Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide ,” by Bernd Schoner, PhD, and cofounder of ThingMagic, which leans heavily on the people side of the equation. It just means that the cofounders trust one of their own and are willing to follow. The industry veteran. The financial suit.

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David Teten

JANUARY 23, 2021

The next best move is to build your core team, e.g., recruit an Advisory Board, Venture Partners, and EIRs. Yohei Nakajima, Founder of Untapped.vc , said, “Before pitching LPs and building my firm, I talked with over 50 people I knew to get feedback.” . Lastly, gather feedback. See Should You Raise A Fund?

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Private Equity Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review 78

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards.

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Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2024

Founders and Innovators should expect that existing organizations and companies will defend their turf – ferociously. Set up committees and advisory boards to “study” the problem. File Inspector General (IG) complaints , claiming innovators are cutting corners, breaking rules or engaging in illegal hiring and spending.

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YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

When the time comes to hire a complete management team or other personnel needed to scale, the right personality and experience fit are critical. Often, the wrong people are hired for the wrong roles, or early team members can’t evolve in line with the company. One of the biggest causes of startup failure is related to team dynamics.

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Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 127

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

.&# I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 11, 2010

“When I get funded,” the entrepreneur thinks, “I can build a prototype, hire a development team, go to market, scale more quickly, and beat my competition.” Many startups have an advisory board of sympathetic people with industry expertise, or people who enjoy mentoring, or people who donate a few services on the come.

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YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

When the time comes to hire a complete management team or other personnel needed to scale, the right personality and experience fit are critical. Often, the wrong people are hired for the wrong roles, or early team members can’t evolve in line with the company. One of the biggest causes of startup failure is related to team dynamics.

Framework 113

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 113

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

Thanks to all of the amazing founders, advisors, co-investors, corporate partners, and others that helped make 2018 an amazing year. To that point, we are most excited when our founders are able to go from slide deck to product-market fit and Series A and beyond. We are truly grateful for your support. First check to Series A?—?congrats

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Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

While he kept bringing the conversation back to their big valuation I tried to steer the conversation back to how they were going to deal with: training the influx of new hires – in both culture and job specific tasks. retaining their existing hires who were working for intern-like salaries with little equity.

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Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

So Member Desk is a virtual and yet it can also be physical, literally sitting in the front of the co- working space inexpensive way to do that for pretty much any organization. But the answer is the co-founder’s been in the industry for 30 years and he’s somebody and so they can get meetings. Jason: Right.

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Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

thinkspace.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2012

How to Divide Equity to Startup Founders, Advisors, and Employees. The part that I’d like to zero in on is when you’ve got a high growth company what are some of the best practices out there to distribute equity to the founders, advisors, and employees? Equity for Founders. Should founders have anti-dilution rights?

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Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.

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SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Advisory Board. 8220; His three things (worth reading his whole post anyway) are set vision/strategy and communicate broadly, recruit/hire/retain top talent, and make sure there’s enough cash in the bank. How To Pick A Co-Founder , by Naval Ravikant (Venture Hacks). Carpe Diem. What Does a CEO Do, Anyway?

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Technology Product San Francisco CTO Hire 191

mashable.com

AUGUST 20, 2011

“There’s simply no budget for [an office], as I bootstrap the company,&# says Paul Molluzzo, founder of Baby Goes Mobile , a web app that lets parents create a private baby book they can view and update from their mobile phones. Once they solidify the next hire, the ThinkBinder team will be moving to their own offices.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

If youre interested in being part of my "customer advisory board" for this presentation, please get in touch. Eric, if youre looking for any help as a "customer advisory board", Id love to do anything I can to help. I would love to be on your advisory board. And thats where the call for help comes in.

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Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Hearpreneur

NOVEMBER 16, 2018

I hired Kara as my legal intern in 2005 while I was working at a small firm doing workers comp and personal injury law. We started as a small consulting practice, focused on the hiring process and recruiting for our corporate clients. 22-Hired a trademark coach. 1- Our names. Photo Credit: Heather James and Kara Cook.

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Austin Startup

OCTOBER 6, 2018

My talk was about the 7 lessons I’ve learned on the journey from founder to CEO. I started off my talk emphasizing that the journey matters most in your transformation from founder to CEO. Nothing says more about your culture than who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote. For example, I hired three CFOs in six years.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

I discuss category creation with one of the co-authors of Play Bigger , Christopher Lochhead, in episode #232 of Legends and Losers if you would like to really delve into that (it is a very important topic). We just hired our first in-house recruiter, Lisa Novak, and she is leading our team in this regard. it isn’t easy.

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Software Review Sales Cofounder Analytics 48

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 26, 2018

by Bruce Hartman , founder of Gideon Partners and author of “ Jesus & Co.: Hiring people that fit a defined culture. Hire People that Match the Culture the Business Needs. Dan, who owned the company had hired a close friend, John, to develop the software for his business. Developing a strong capital base.

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Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Matching 100

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 29, 2018

Bill Wood, founder of Silverton Partners and an early General Partner at Austin Ventures before, said something that got me thinking (quoting from the SiliconHills article ): Because it’s easy to startup a company and doesn’t take a lot of money, Silverton Partners sees more startups forming, Wood said. in the long-run, I say!?—?success

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Cofounder Austin Technical Review Advisory Board 48

Austin Startup

MARCH 31, 2019

We were really impressed with Keith Benjamin in particular and he was joining our Board of Directors (unfortunately Keith passed away in a tragic accident in 2008 as I wrote about in this Bazaarvoice blog post ; I think about him often?—?he he was an incredible friend and eCommerce and Wall Street visionary). We all have them?—?no and free?—?resource),

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venturehacks.com

MARCH 21, 2008

Normal advisors are also assembled by naive entrepreneurs who think the mere presence of an advisory board will create social proof and help them raise money. But investors don’t take these mock advisory boards seriously. SKMurphy » Common Questions about Advisory Boards - Jun 2, 2009 [.]

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betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

When we pivoted from fabulis to Fab, we pivoted towards building a business around the unique tastemaker talents of one of our founders, Bradford Shellhammer. Have amazing co-founders who are better at what they do than you could ever be. Founders need to personally own something big themselves. It’s that important.

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Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

The VP of Sales and I flew to Providence to convince Andy van Dam at Brown to join our company, or at a minimum lead our advisory board. Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. A few days later Gordon became a founder. We’re building a supercomputer.”

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 132

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started. The belief then was that most founders couldn’t acquire the skills rapidly enough to steer the company through this phase.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Although I wish I could take credit for these pivots, the reality is that they were not caused by my singular insight or that of my other co-founders.

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Mike Michalowicz

JULY 13, 2015

That’s when she started her research on how she was going to develop Balance Your Books to sustain without her day-to-day involvement, grow the talented team she was fortunate to have hired, and grow her clients into well-rounded profitable entrepreneurs. Jared Hecht (right). Show Quotes .

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thestartuplawyer.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

He obviously never launched a startup and got shafted by a co-founder. He obviously never launched a startup and got shafted by a co-founder. You can start by examining every aspect of the co-founder relationship. Don’t leave anything out just because you and your co-founders already talked about it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Today, when I talk to startup founders, the most common answer I get to the question "do you talk to your customers?" Establish a customer advisory board. Most of the people building our product werent themselves target customers. So there was simply no substitute for seeing actual customers with the product, live.

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venturehacks.com

DECEMBER 9, 2012

Some entrepreneurs set up quarterly advisory board meetings and that probably works well for them. But we find savvy entrepreneurs tend to be transactional—they ping their advisors as needed and skip the advisory board meetings. Your task is to hire the maverick advisors in the crowd. How do I apply advice?

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Advisory Board Cap Table RSS Cofounder 50

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

And Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture is a huge help to startup founders. Gary Marcus , one of the country’s best-known cognitive psychologists, is a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and founder of Geometric Intelligence. What do you do with an advisory board?” They want to collaborate.

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Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York 120

Life Beyond Code

AUGUST 28, 2013

You may not be able to get along with your co-founders causing heartburn for everyone. Your first few hires may be wrong bringing down the whole company. You don’t have a well rounded advisory board to help you fill all the gaps. You may not able to attract the right team to grow.

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Advisory Board Startup Dilution Cofounder 117

Business Plan Blog

DECEMBER 10, 2013

When raising pre-seed capital from friends, family, and founders (FFF) you’ll want to consider the milestones that Angel investors care about and be sure to raise enough capital to reach those milestones. Founding Team, Key Hires, Advisory Board.

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Business Plan Blog

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

The use of your initial friends, family, and founders (FFF) capital should be directed towards achieving the milestones that will attract seed or angel investors (likewise, the use of your seed funding should be directed towards achieving the milestones that will attract Series A investors). Founding Team, Key Hires, Advisory Board.

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