Entrepreneurs Should be Respected, Not Loved
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a great leader and seem to be having this conversation a lot lately about Facebook, Yahoo!, Zynga and others. I wrote several of the characteristics when I did the Top 10 (11) Attributes of an Entrepreneur. One thing that I’ve realized over the years [...]
The Right Way to Cancel a Meeting
Canceling meetings is part of modern day life. I seem to get so over programmed that if I ever want to have a “break-out” unplanned trip somewhere I seem to have to reschedule meetings. Not fun, but a reality. And people reschedule meetings with me on a regular basis, too. If done correctly I never [...]
The Toxic Nature of Email
I haven’t written a blog post in a week. I travelled for a couple of days for work and decided to get some sleep on those days rather than staying up into the wee hours as I often do when I travel. I closed one deal (I’ll talk about that soon) and issued one term [...]
How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings
Running the “Agile” Board Most early stage startups having monthly board meetings. I normally recommend 8 meetings per year. It makes no sense to meet in August or December due to travel schedules of most investors. You can do calls if need be. And I often recommend that board meetings be every 5 or 6 [...]
The Long-Term Value of Loyalty
Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another post on job hopping. This will be my final word on the topic. I promise. My goal here is to move the debate forward, add my POV but not inflame things any further. Inflaming was never my goal. Let’s see if I can achieve that. My WORD of [...]
Job Hoppers Redux: An Employee’s Perspective
On Thursday of last week I cranked out a post on job hoppers . To say that it was controversial is an understatement. I intended for it to be provocative but not inflammatory. So let me start with an apology. Not for my point-of-view (which I stand by and accept that not everybody feels the same way) [...]
Want to Raise Venture Capital More Easily? Clean Up Your Own Shite First
Clean up your own shite. Ok. I know that the tone of the title and post will seem a bit aggressive for a post from a venture capitalist on fund raising. It’s meant to be a bit provocative but the reality is that I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the the time and I [...]
How to Improve Hiring at Startups
This is part of my ongoing series with Startup Advice. OK, hiring is a loooong topic and I couldn’t do it justice in single post. But I thought it might be useful to do a headline view of the key components and then come back and do the individual topics over time if people seem [...]
Don’t be a Grin Fucker
OK, this will be a test of whether using real curse words in your title or post gets all of your stuff blocked by spam filters or from appearing on HackerNews or the like. I thought about trying to spell it differently (like Guy Kawasaki always says Bull Shitake (as in the mushroom, but slightly [...]
6 Tips for Building Relationships with Journalists
File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. I was over at Robert Scoble’s blog Sunday night reading about the “Death of the Great Startup Launch.” I’m not 100% sure that I understood his core thesis but I *think* it was that startup events such as Demo force such a zone of secrecy [...]
Should Your Startup Give Performance-Based Warrants?
This is part of my ongoing series on Startup Advice Large companies can be strange sometimes. As startup entrepreneurs we all want to work with them because having their name as reference clients makes it so much easier for marketing, PR, selling to other customers, fund raising and even recruiting. Plus, we’re all allured by [...]
Want to Start a Technology Company in LA?
Los Angeles. People either love it our hate it. All the stereotypes and caricatures are overblown. And we’re left with a city with idyllic weather, major commerce, the media center of the world, and a great emerging technology scene. We have an abundance of ethnicities, culinary options, music and culture. Randy Newman said it best, “I [...]
Why The ‘Fail Fast’ Mantra Needs to Fail
Yesterday I wrote a post about how much capital your startup should raise . In that post I was talking about how it is a bad strategy to be underfunded. In general when capital is available take it (provided it’s on the right conditions and from the best people from whom you can raise). It’s [...]
How to Quit Your Job
File this under entrepreneurial advice I know that this will sound like a random post topic for startup advice but I promise it’s relevant. You actually need to give advice to nearly every employee whom you offer a job to on how to best quit their job. This is important to improve conversion rates of [...]
What is the Right Amount of Money to Raise at a Startup?
This is part of my ongoing series on Raising Venture Capital. Recently I’ve been debating with a number of young startup companies that are raising money in the next few months, “what is the right about of capital to raise at a startup?” It’s a tricky question with no clear answer. There are trade offs. [...]
