Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 9, 2020

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Cofounder 435

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Equity Intellectual Property 435

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 30, 2014

It’s true the some VCs have started writing so many checks that they resemble stock pickers but the majority of us still have less than 10 board seats at any time and tend to go pretty deep so the result is that we care deeply about where we commit our time. Meredith came to see me along with the CTO Marc Berte.

Technical Review 418

Technical Review Software Review Due Diligence CTO Hire 418

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

To turn your company’s stock into cash, you engaged a top-notch investment bank (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) and/or their Silicon Valley compatriots (Hambrecht & Quist, Montgomery Securities, Robertson Stephens). Hire a CEO to Go Public. If the founder was lucky, he got to stay as chairman or CTO.

Founder 281

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 281

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 1, 2014

The first is that it could carry limited inventory in stock because it had limited physical shelf space. But what if you could do the reverse of Amazon? Amazon was early in spotting a macro trend – that physical, local retail had a few key disadvantages. I wrote about that experience here without giving away the details of the business.

Technical Review 380

Technical Review Software Review Cofounder CTO Hire 380

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. In addition to helping manage the board Chris also helps represent the interests of the angel investors / common stock holders. Trust me – that kind of encounter can mean the difference between securing a contract, protecting yourself from getting turfed or getting acquired one day.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 22, 2010

Things like “ participating preferred stock &# in legalese unsurprisingly never actually call out, “hey, this is the participating preferred language.&# We got a3x participating liquidation preference with interest (not participating with a 3x cap, but 3x participating. The VC assumes you’ll have an option pool.

Valuation 405

Valuation Liquidation Preference Pre-Money Valuation Term Sheet 405

The Next Web

JANUARY 24, 2014

At the same time we have several culturally-driven attitudes holding us back. So let’s take stock: What do we offer? Think of Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), Guido van Rossem (founder of Python programming language and senior engineer at Dropbox) or the more senior Gerard Kleisterlee (chairman of Vodafone). Not in my view.

Netherlands 143

Netherlands Technical Review Stock Silicon Valley 143

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2023

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Cofounders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Technical Cofounder 247

Technical Cofounder Equity Distribution Cofounder 247

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 10, 2018

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 238

Equity Cofounder Technical Cofounder Intellectual Property 238

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 18, 2020

As a company grows, corporate leaders must become fixated on the stock price, internal politics and compliance. Similarly, SuppliedShop.com allowed small retailers — lone-person, part-time and stay-at-home-mom operations — to buy products directly from factories risk-free, even if they could only invest a few hundred dollars on inventory.

Fractional CTO 147

Fractional CTO CTO Hire China Silicon Valley 147

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. 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. It’s great advice.

Technology 191

Technology Product San Francisco CTO Hire 191

The Next Web

OCTOBER 7, 2013

They were referring to non-founder engineers, most commonly the first hire for technology businesses. Every time a startup raises capital, all common shareholders are diluted. In cases where a startup is sold within a few years time, there is often acceleration agreements for unvested shares.

Engineer 129

Engineer Dilution Option Pool Vesting 129

www.lanceglasser.com

MAY 13, 2012

Growth, Profitability, and the Stock Price. Stock buybacks. What does a CTO do? Growth, Profitability, and the Stock Price. What does a CTO do? What does a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) do in a high-tech company? So what is the CTO job? This is where you should see the CTO. What goes around.

CTO 40

CTO CTO Hire Technical Review Architecture 40

The Next Web

OCTOBER 10, 2013

Hire everyone you need as an employee. After launching our Windows online backup service five years ago, our CTO pitched that we should focus on launching our Mac version next. At that time, Mac computers made up a mere 6 percent of the market and I argued we needed to focus on other areas. We split our stock one-fifth each.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Kenya Dilution 143

www.informationarbitrage.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Home About Press IA Capital Partners Archives After 17 years in M&A, Derivatives and Trading, Im spending my time with young entrepreneurs in and around financial technology and digital media. Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Founder Cap Table Vesting 40

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 24, 2016

Level of responsibility and time allocated. Co-founders only able to work part-time, with responsibility and major income sources elsewhere, don’t carry the same risk as others with more operational responsibility. The CTO of many technical startups was the original founder.

Equity 120

Equity Cofounder Technical Cofounder Intellectual Property 120

BeyondVC

SEPTEMBER 5, 2007

Moving on, it is clear that red shift data requirements are only a fraction of what’s necessary to meet this exponential growth as it will put tremendous strain on the existing IT infrastructure consuming ever-increasing amounts of CPU cycles, energy, storage, and more. Ok-enough of the sales pitch.

CTO Hire 78

CTO Hire Fractional CTO EC2 Database 78

thinkspace.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2012

I was originally hired as a contractor, developing a SaaS app from scratch, including DB design and coding. Along the way, I was hired full time (I believe about 8 months after I started), a coder from India was hired and another contractor was added to the team. omissions/lies on the part of founders & investors. .

Equity 62

Equity Employee Founder CTO Hire 62

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 2, 2011

She was the former CTO of Cisco Systems from 1998-2000, and is on the boards of Disney and Packet Design and was a board member at Sun and FedEx for many years. Precept Software, another of her startups, was bought by Cisco just prior to the company's stock price run-up, "so we had a great outcome for our investors.".

CTO Hire 118

CTO Hire Startup Algorithm Leadership 118

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2017

31 ( limited to the first 200 Gold Passholders.)

Lean 108

Lean Programming San Francisco Cofounder 108

BeyondVC

SEPTEMBER 5, 2007

Moving on, it is clear that red shift data requirements are only a fraction of what’s necessary to meet this exponential growth as it will put tremendous strain on the existing IT infrastructure consuming ever-increasing amounts of CPU cycles, energy, storage, and more. Ok-enough of the sales pitch. Red-shift companies tend to be Web 2.0

CTO Hire 60

CTO Hire Fractional CTO EC2 Database 60

The Next Web

AUGUST 12, 2013

Finding co-founders is hard, and I would never recommend to hire a co-founder – usually you start a business with people you know for years (as there is already an existing level of trust there and you also know they are capable of fulfilling their duties). They should be able to hire great designers to help build a better product.

Cofounder 119

Cofounder CTO Hire Startup Europe 119

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. Wasn’t he a CTO or something? (He We were painting a picture of hypertext on every desktop computer. The response from across the country?

North Carolina 133

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 133

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

Correction: Last week's CTO position at Modcloth is actually a San Francisco opportunity, not Pittsburgh. If you know of senior level business and technical professionals looking for exciting startup opportunities, they can sign up here: [link].

San Francisco 92

San Francisco CTO Hire Developer EC2 92

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 14, 2013

Today's post is brought to you by my friend, Paul Blumenfeld , a recruiter who is one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to hiring processes. Many hiring managers write a job spec that is heavy on wishes and low on real needs. I also ask hiring managers to be open-minded about their must-haves. Like Pornography?

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Matching Hiring 54

www.avc.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. First, a caveat.

Equity 64

Equity Employee CTO Hire Fractional CTO 64

www.entrepreneur.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

However, your partner could just as easily have argued that her sweat equity is worth $250,000 since that's what a prototype would have cost you to make had you hired a prototype development firm. Or she could argue that the prototype is so critical to the business that she should get 50 percent of the company's stock.

Sweat Equity 55

Sweat Equity Equity Fractional CTO CTO 55

Startup Company Lawyer

MAY 1, 2009

For example, below are the 2008 results for average equity granted at time of hire in IT companies: CEO 5.40%. Head of Technology/CTO 1.19%. Tags: Stock options. The 2008 results are available on Altgate and are also embedded below. President/COO 2.58%. Head of Engineering 1.32%. Head of Sales 1.20%.

Stock Options 31

Stock Options CTO Hire Israel Equity 31

Startup Company Lawyer

MAY 4, 2009

Joe Betts-LaCroix – CTO, OQO. Hiring and Firing. July 14th, 2009: Implement hiring policies and practices. Description: When to hire and when to fire? How to hire the best vendors for the best rates. Mentors for the Summer 2009 Semester include: Trip Adler – CEO, Scribd. Jason Calacanis - CEO, Mahalo.

Founder 28

Founder Warrant San Francisco Intellectual Property 28

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Delaware law gives preferred stock investors of a corporation certain voting rights and control over the corporation. The business model. Pick a name for your business.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

www.quora.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Type to Add and Search Questions; Search Topics and People Startups Startup Compensation Entrepreneurship Compensation Stock Options Major Internet Companies Silicon Valley Why is there such a large founder to early employee equity drop-off? Is there a difference between getting equity, stock, shares? Founder or employee?

Equity 40

Equity Employee Founder Cofounder 40

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

At one of our initial board meetings we had agreed on the general principle of an advisory board and put together an overall stock budget to compensate advisors. One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems.

Advisory Board 266

Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 266

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 14, 2011

In fact, it doesn't fit any of our stock ideological categories very well. There's never been a better time to innovate" United States CTO Aneesh Chopra kicked off the event by saying: "there's never been a better time to innovate." I don't control any government contracts. I have no budget," he said. "I

DC 167

DC CTO Hire Fractional CTO Silicon Valley 167

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

At the time, RIM was the dominant smartphone company and Livingston settled into a “process-heavy” job within the company, where he worked tirelessly all hours. “By At the end of my four-month term, they brought me on part-time to run a team that built out a system around the software I’d developed at night.”.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Startup Mobile 167

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

The reality however is that entrepreneurs should only play the equity game with newer, very focused firms that specialize in this practice and not traditional work for hire or a blend. Development firms that advertise part equity and cash are simply not mature in defining their model, and thus they have no business taking stakes in others.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 4, 2018

Increasingly powerful systems cracked open the door for real-time predictive analytics. A world of real-time predictions. For some, the age of “real-time” predictive analytics is here. A simple predictive analysis is your arrival time in Waze. Slow adoption but soaring interest. Data, data, and data.

Analytics 131

Analytics Algorithm Artificial Inteligence Campaign 131

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 30, 2014

Founded by former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and Google App Engine creator Kevin Gibbs, Quip was recognized by Technology Review as one of the “ Breakthrough Technologies of 2014 ” for making it effortless and fruitful to create and edit documents on mobile devices for real-time collaboration.

API 60

API Software Review Technical Review Startup 60