“It’s the suckiest thing about being a startup CEO,” I said to “Bill”. I could see the sadness written all over his face. “I can totally relate because I went through the same thing,” I said. “The people you start (your company) with are not necessarily the people you finish with. “I know,” I said.…
“You screwed up,” “Bob”, the CEO, said to his executive team during our weekly operations meeting. “How am I going to explain this to ‘the street’?” Bob was upset because the company had missed its promised numbers to Wall Street, again. And now Bob would have to explain the miss to market analysts. Or would…
“You can’t tell the new investors that ‘Tommy’ quit!” “Raul”, one of my investors, said to me when I told him our new VP Sales, had resigned that morning. “Your job now is to get him (Tommy) to change his mind,” Raul said. I called Gill, our other investor, to let him know about Tommy.…
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when I meet an early stage startup CEO who’s focused on selling their company. Inevitably, I’ll ask the CEO, “Why are you focused on a sale now?” Inevitably, the answer, more times than not, comes back as, “I’m thinking we’ll be selling the company in the next couple…
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” “Serge”, the CEO of a struggling startup, said to me. “I think I’m going to give up.” “What?” I responded. Serge’s capitulation said didn’t register on me. It was foreign to my way of thinking. Worse yet, Serge’s company wasn’t doomed to fail. There was a…
“How do you think Maxim (Integrated Products) will react when you resign?” I asked Jeroen. We had just signed a $12 million term sheet for our initial funding, and Jeroen and I had agreed that now was the time for him to resign and become our full time Vice President of Engineering. “I don’t know,”…
“I’d like you to be the CEO of the company,” “Ray” said to me. We were meeting for the first time outside of a Starbucks in Los Altos. Ray had spent the previous thirty minutes explaining what his company was going to do. In fact, there wasn’t even a company at this point. There was…
“We should be raising a $6 million round, not $12 million,” “Randy”, my co-founder, said to me. In fact, Randy was so pissed at the terms of our funding that he was threatening to quit. “Let’s meet, so I can walk you through why we are better off with the larger amount of funding,” I…
“The talent level here is really high,” I said to the engineering candidate I was interviewing. “So, if you want to work with the best of the best, you should join us.” I was the last person to interview Melind, the closer, so to speak. Jeroen, my co-founder and VP Engineering told me that he…
“Nothing seems to faze you,” “Raul”, one of my investors said to me during our 1:1 meeting in his office. He’d been an investor in our company for one year. Raul was pretty crusty, so I considered what he said to be a compliment. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help.…