Years ago, I was introduced to the two co-founders of a fledgling semiconductor company. I have an affinity for companies in the space, so I agreed to talk with them. The two co-founders told me they had no funding, and they were looking to hire a VP of Engineering. They found a good candidate for…
Don’t fool yourself. The odds are decidedly against you raising money for your startup. Only 1% of all startups get any outside funding. That’s it! But let’s say that you believe your startup is destined to be the one out of 100 startups that receive angel or VC funding, yet you’re still not breaking…
We’ve all been there before. Nobody likes going to meetings and wasting their time. It’s like this: You go to the meeting. There’s small talk, people are joking around, and people are wasting your precious time. This happens when you have a lot of people in the room together. You can count up the dollars…
Years ago, I was interviewing VP Sales candidates. One of the first candidates I interviewed was someone that I quickly realized was completely wrong for the job. I finished the interview, and I thanked him for his time. Then, as I usually did when there was no hope of the person progressing to the next…
“I need to make $60,000,” “Mary”, the CEO, said to me. “Is that too much for me to make?” “Maybe. Maybe not,” I replied. “I can’t just give you a yes or no answer. You have to walk through some steps. “There’s a very simple rule to figuring out your salary after you’ve just raised…
My wife and I went for a run together last week, and, on our walk home, we started talking about Elizabeth Holmes. The new docudrama about her and Theranos, “Dropout”, just dropped on Showtime, so it was on the top of our minds. “I think we should watch it (Dropout),” Blossom said to me. “What…
“You’re a first time CEO. You’re going to make mistakes.” That’s what investors say about first time CEOs. And, you know what, investors are right, you’re going to make mistakes. However, why make business mistakes when you can avoid them. In today’s video, I’ll walk you through the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make. Plus, I’ll…
“We are going to grow our earnings by one penny per share per quarter,” Jack Gifford, Maxim Integrated Products founding CEO, regularly said to public market sell side analysts. And every quarter, like a clock, the company grew earnings at one penny per quarter or better. It sounds boring doesn’t it? One penny per quarter…
“I want to cut the equity of my co-founder from 45 percent to twenty percent,” “Oren” said to me. “He’s not performing very well. What do you think?” “I don’t think that’s going to go over very well,” I said. “You certainly can try, but I don’t think it’s going to work.” “Why don’t you…
100 to one. Burn that ratio into your brain. That’s the number of face to face meetings a typical venture capital firm will have for every one startup they invest in. How do I know this? I was an Entrepreneur in Residence with a major VC fund in San Francisco. Raising your startup funding isn’t…