Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 Building your board is one of the few proactive steps you can take to build valuation that doesn’t necessarily directly involve your product or service (unlike sales or product development). Investors will recognize your appreciation of oversight and will be influenced by these directors spending their valuable time for stock-based ...
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Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 When we read business plans, we find that most entrepreneurs tell us how they’re going to scale to their mature size. The plans focus on the channel sales, the viral growth or some other aspect of sales that is highly scalable and compelling.But why do some startups get initial traction ...
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009 So often, when we talk about the terms of an agreement that one of our portfolio company is negotiating, we hear advice that just isn’t helpful. There are plenty of unfavorable terms that startups must accept in their early agreements. It’s just the reality of being the smaller party with ...
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 Yea, though I launch in the marketplace of the shadow of corporate behemoths,I will fear no market share for I am the most nimble motherfucker in my industry.I will neither fear their limitless marketing budgets nor their ginormous IT staffs.My financial model and my investor deck, they comfort me.Though the ...
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Saturday, September 13th, 2008 Top ten mistakes10. Being a wuss about incremental gains and releases (Perfect is the enemy of good)9. Belief that you’re always going to be the CEO (Noam)Company stages8. Taking bad advice (Gary Ritner story)Have they done it before, are they truly credible
Don’t ask me about your dev plan or choice ...
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Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 First, let’s get one thing clear. You’re here to build and operate a business – not to build and deliver an investor pitch.
Alas, the latter is a requirement unless you’re willing to tap that pile of gold doubloons in your basement to get your company off the ground. At ...
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Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 If you’re launching a web service for consumers, you have an important decision to make: how will you take your web application to market? You have a pricing decision to make and trying to grow your user base by selling at list price probably won’t work. Most successful launches involved ...
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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 We’ve dealt with many commission plans. Some we inherited, some we wrote. And we’ve faced the unpleasant task of disputes related to them. First-time drafters of commission plans don’t realize that a plan only starts with the commission percentage – there’s much more.Commissionable Sales – It may be obvious, but ...
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Friday, February 1st, 2008 I review a lot of investor pitches. While my reviews have many commonalities, I find that too often entrepreneurs opt for easy statements to which I’ve referred as “cheap”. Cheap words can be used by anyone. We’ve all seen them:We have a world-class team
The market is huge
This is ...
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Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 There are three deal terms that have become common practice and we’d like to start a discussion about them. My intent here is to provoke thought, so I’ll take one side with a simplified argument. Let’s get it started by saying that we’ve had enough of “burn rate”, EBITDA as ...
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