How Often Should You Call A Big Potential Customer?
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was from a mentor I had named Lew. Lew was an old school sales guy, trained by the legendary Don Valentine at Fairchild Semiconductor back in the day. After working at Fairchild, Lew ran several large sales organizations. Then he ended up in private equity,…
How Do You Value Your Startup?
There’s a lot of advice for entrepreneurs on how do you value your startup. Unfortunately, most of the startup advice is wrong. The goal of today’s video is to give you a simple methodology for valuing your startup; especially if your company is an early stage startup. We’ll look at how you answer investors questions…
What Should You Do When You’re Burned Out?
I remember the moment clearly. We had finally gotten to $100K per month in revenue. This should have been a moment of celebration because $100K per month is when you’ve hit escape velocity. If you just keep at it, you’ll be at $1 million per month in no time flat. However, all I could think…
How Do You Recruit Your Startup Team?
Years ago, I was in a meeting with Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim Integrated Products. Maxim’s revenue was around $1 billion per year at the time. Also in the meeting was “Peter”, one of the best engineering managers in the company. Peter was complaining to Gifford how hard it was to recruit great…
How Square’s Pitch Deck Can Help You Raise Money
Square’s pitch deck is one of the more interesting investor pitch decks available online. So, the question is what lessons can you apply to your pitch deck based on the Square’s pitch deck? In today’s video, I’ll break down Square’s pitch deck presentation, slide by slide, so you can improve your investment pitch deck structure. …
The Secret To Presenting Your Pitch Deck Financials
There’s a right way and a wrong way to show your pitch deck financials when you pitch investors. The problem is that just about every entrepreneur presents their financial slide incorrectly. If you present your pitch deck financial slide incorrectly, the result is a lost opportunity for you, the CEO, to improve your chances of…
The Right Way For You To Handle A Competitive Threat
When I worked at Maxim Integrated Products, we used to have our planning meetings over at the Peppermill restaurant in Cupertino. I think it’s gone now, but it was a great venue for us to meet at. The Peppermill was great because, well, there weren’t a lot of people in the restaurant at 8:30AM, so…
Handling The Bad Days Is Key To Your Success
“As you know, Brett presented to my partnership at ‘Donald Ventures’,” “Raul” said to myself and the other board members at our board meeting. “And the meeting went horribly. “None of my partners believes we should continue supporting the company,” Raul said, then he twisted the knife. “So, we are pulling our support for the…
The Slide To Add To Your Pitch…
No One Tells You About There’s one slide that you should add to your pitch deck that no one tells you about. But, when you add it to your deck, it shows potential investors that you: Are Transparent Know the market and the competition Know your strengths and weaknesses You’ll be a great CEO to…
What Should Your Startup’s Sick Policy Be?
“When you’re sick stay home. When you’re healthy come to work.” That was the sick policy I had at my company. I didn’t ask my employees to fill out any paperwork. I didn’t have a maximum amount of sick days. And, for the life of my company, our simplistic sick policy worked really well. Now,…