Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 22, 2010

I hear a lot of entrepreneurs contemplating their great “idea” for several years with little discernable progress, and looking for money to start. Talk and time are cheap, but they need to understand that investors judge past results as a good indicator of future expectations. Get a real customer and real revenue.

Intellectual Property 222

Intellectual Property Sweat Equity Fractional CTO CTO Hire 222

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

I’m an entrepreneur at heart so I’m always inspired when I hear stories about innovation. It’s why my investment philosophy is called, “ the entrepreneur thesis.&#. I was meeting with a first-time CEO of a very promising young startup recently and offering my advice on what his priorities should be.

Seattle 317

Seattle Silicon Valley Technical Review Los Angeles 317

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

I’d say about 80% of the experienced entrepreneurs & VCs I know privately agreed with me. One great solution I see is to hire an outstanding CFO who runs both. I usually encourage people to think about titles like, “Founder & CTO&# or “Founder & VP Marketing.&#. Naturally some didn’t.

Operations 292

Operations CTO Hire Startup Early Stage 292

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Our plan is to have seven figure revenues and be profitable by Q3, in addition to to seven new hires by end of the year," he says. We wrote about their innovative program last fall.

St. Louis 118

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www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Entrepreneur DNA. Entrepreneur turned VC. Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? The terms “CTO” and “VP Engineering” have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward.

Fractional VPE 89

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 14, 2012

Most businesses stay that way - there are many more solo entrepreneurs than business owners with employees. To learn more about how your startup can find, hire and keep the top talent and quality workers it needs to succeed, download this free ReadWriteWeb Report: The Talent Wars: Today’s Toughest Startup Challenge.

Technical Review 159

Technical Review CTO Hire Software Review Startup 159

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 5, 2015

by Marcus Turner, President and CTO of Enola Labs. From that experience, I have grown as an entrepreneur, but that “growth” came at a tremendous expense, so I thought I would share the 5 lessons I learned throughout that experience that every entrepreneur should know.

Fractional CTO 100

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Advisory Board Software Review 100

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. How-to get that guy as your mentor - Gabriel Weinberg , September 20, 2010 Forming a couple of good mentor relationships can help bridge the gap between startup failure and success, especially for first-time entrepreneurs.

Technology 191

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world. It may be that all the doomsayers are right.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 27, 2010

I mean, you don’t have to build an actual business—you can just mimic the movements and demonstrate something that looks like a startup on paper, without any of the necessary risk taking, lessons learned or even a fraction of the effort—all the stuff that investors like to see. No revenues, no costs.

New York 132

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Hearpreneur

MAY 15, 2019

We asked some entrepreneurs and business owners, why they started their businesses: #1- For me. We will be hiring people with mental and physical disabilities in the near future. From that business I started a business consulting and development company that assists aspiring entrepreneurs with starting and maintaining their companies.

Fractional CTO 122

Fractional CTO Entrepreneur CTO Hire LLC 122

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. Instead of the “entrepreneur that knows what the market wants”, we move to the “entrepreneur that knows how to discover what the market wants”. If there is a possibility of a Pivot, the person you just hired may not be the right person after the Pivot.

Product Development 153

Product Development Lean Developer Product 153

Business Plan Blog

OCTOBER 4, 2013

Don’t hire people with skills and qualifications similar to yours. Hire based on functionality and avoid having too many C’s. This helps to better divide the work, make people accountable, and show investors just why each founder/hire is key to the organization. Hiring the right people at the right time is key.

Part-Time VPE 79

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View from Seed

MARCH 22, 2016

This is for the early-stage companies — the entrepreneurs with great ideas and tireless work ethics who feel like they’ve emailed half of the country’s news outlets with nothing but the rare “thanks, but not interested” reply to show for it. Tell me about that time a prospective investor royally screwed you over. The irony hurts.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup CTO Hire 120

The Next Web

AUGUST 12, 2013

It’s part three of a series, cross-posted from his own blog , in which he draws on his experience to offer advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in Europe and beyond. So far I have shared with you 6 simple steps to start your own tech business (don’t miss part 1 and part 2 ). Why do you want to build a business?

Cofounder 119

Cofounder CTO Hire Startup Europe 119

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

DartBoston: A vibrant community of young entrepreneurs. Babson Entrepreneur Resource Center. link] – Not a meetup, but a great mentorship program started by serial CTO Sean Lindsay. Scaling Companies To Watch (ie: probably hiring). Wayfair - $350M + revenue, 300 employees. Led by serial entrepreneur Mike Baker.

Boston 72

Boston Community CTO Hire Cofounder 72

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

In two cases, these businesses were doing significant early revenue ($500K/month+), so could be considered “post-seed”, although both of these companies had not raised significant institutional capital before we led their rounds. Of the last 15 investments we’ve made, 8 have been pre-product or pre-seed style rounds.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

BeyondVC

APRIL 3, 2006

One of the discussion groups that I led with Simon Levene (heads up Corp Dev in Europe for Yahoo and Yair Goldfinger (founder and CTO of ICQ and Dotomi) was titled "Are Internet VCs Dead." Yahoo, on the other hand, prefers to buy companies that have some nice user base, maybe no revenue model yet, but also before a VC round.

Technical Cofounder 60

Technical Cofounder CTO Hire Fractional CTO Israel 60

BeyondVC

APRIL 3, 2006

One of the discussion groups that I led with Simon Levene (heads up Corp Dev in Europe for Yahoo and Yair Goldfinger (founder and CTO of ICQ and Dotomi) was titled "Are Internet VCs Dead." Yahoo, on the other hand, prefers to buy companies that have some nice user base, maybe no revenue model yet, but also before a VC round.

Technical Cofounder 60

Technical Cofounder CTO Hire Fractional CTO Israel 60

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

DartBoston: A vibrant community of young entrepreneurs. Babson Entrepreneur Resource Center. link] – Not a meetup, but a great mentorship program started by serial CTO Sean Lindsay. Scaling Companies To Watch (ie: probably hiring). Wayfair - $350M + revenue, 300 employees. Led by serial entrepreneur Mike Baker.

Boston 56

Boston Technical Review Community CTO Hire 56

This is going to be BIG.

MARCH 1, 2010

What gets frustrating is that I tend to hear the same arguments over and over again from new entrepreneurs, and many of them are just completely unfunded. Unfortunately, they tend to resonate really well with frustrated entrepreneurs and a lot of dust gets kicked up over them. You know what—it’s supposed to work like that!

New York City 120

New York City New York Startup Burn Rate 120

Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 31, 2024

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. I wonder how many intros have that in with his high school friend, Amir Glot, who is now the CTO in 2008.

Web 72

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Sophia Perl of Wisdom

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

Some of the finalists were generating revenues already and/or have very promising strategic partnerships lined up. What key hires do you need? The business model for residential solar panel company: contract with customer, local rebates, and tax benefits. I don’t make it out to SF much, but for special occasions I will.

CTO Hire 49

CTO Hire Cofounder Fractional CTO San Francisco 49

Hearpreneur

JULY 30, 2016

Female entrepreneurs and business owners are no longer taken with a grain of salt. Female entrepreneurs continue to make strides in business despite the pay gap, discrimination, and gender politics which play out on both large and small stages. But only around 2% will actually achieve revenues over $1 million dollars.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Technical Cofounder Entrepreneur CTO Hire 48

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

A year goes by, you miss your revenue plan, and you’ve burned through your first VP of Sales. If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. I don’t know any developers. No phone system.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Hearpreneur

JUNE 21, 2017

It doesn’t matter if it has been said before and repeated numerous times, quotes can give you the fire you need to be a better entrepreneur or learn how to handle a difficult situation. Below are some of those quotes sent in by entrepreneurs throughout the country. #1 8 – You cant change the world working part time.

Entrepreneur 55

Entrepreneur Africa Cofounder CTO Hire 55

Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 4, 2022

If you're looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to, to action and get what you want out of your career. So now it's the chief revenue officer, right. John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah.

CTO 93

CTO Cofounder Networking Operations 93

Sophia Perl of Wisdom

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

Some of the finalists were generating revenues already and/or have very promising strategic partnerships lined up. What key hires do you need? The business model for residential solar panel company: contract with customer, local rebates, and tax benefits. I don’t make it out to SF much, but for special occasions I will.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Cofounder Fractional CTO San Francisco 40

Hippoland

OCTOBER 9, 2016

As an entrepreneur, you think your idea is unique. If you’re still in the early stages of your entrepreneur-education/journey, you may even think you need to protect your idea and not share it with anyone. Most entrepreneurs overpitch their ideas but underpitch how they’ve been executing. And convey this in your pitch.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage CTO Hire Email Later Stage 48

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

Tony Saldanha (P&G Next Gen Svces, Transformant), Farhan Shah (Allstate, CTO, Head of Platform Eng), Munu Gandhi (VP Infrastructure, AON), Virginia Lyons (CISO, Williams Sonoma) and GTM advisors?—?Natalie The 10 year bull market where every company’s revenue chart is up and to the right is over. New CXO advisors join?—?

Advisory Board 79

Advisory Board Stealth Cloud Virginia 79

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

New CXO advisors join Tony Saldanha (P&G Next Gen Svces, Transformant), Farhan Shah (Allstate, CTO, Head of Platform Eng), Munu Gandhi (VP Infrastructure, AON), Virginia Lyons (CISO, Williams Sonoma) and GTM advisorsNatalie Diggins (Neustar, ex-VP Cloud Platform/DevOps), Francesca Krihely (MongoDB, Dir.

Advisory Board 78

Advisory Board Stealth Cloud Virginia 78

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. Most firms that do decide to take equity do so because their risk is far reduced when compared to that of the entrepreneur, or that of the traditional cash investor.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. If you want a slice of the pie, there isn’t a better time to get involved. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. The business model.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Duct Tape Marketing

DECEMBER 14, 2017

He started Stackify to solve the biggest challenge he had as the CTO of VinSolutions, so Matt, thanks for joining me. I was that hired gun in some senses. In 2011, before we sold the business, we had a business that was making $30 million a year in revenue, but we’ve never raised any capital. Matt Watson: Yeah. Absolutely.

Kansas City 60

Kansas City CTO Hire Las Vegas Software Developers 60

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 14, 2024

I did pretty good, made a bunch of commission, ended up buying my first electronics manufacturing company, and that one I started, I think I negated a lot of failure in the early part of it because I always had somebody that was kind of in the game that knew how not to fail. (03:15): And we said, sales. (07:06): Like, oh, cool.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Software Review Sales Cloud 93