Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2010

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. I recommend that every early-stage startup find three Advisory Board members. Once your company is past the startup stage, you do need a board of directors.

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Advisory Board Technical Review Software Review Early Stage 125

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 26, 2022

Maintaining your team’s passion and freedom to focus first on innovating for customers are only a couple of the reasons for thinking hard before you seek money from crowdfunding, angel investors, venture capital organizations, or attempt to qualify for a public stock offering. Investors want board seats and a vote on key decisions.

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Cost Bootstrapping Advisory Board Startup 267

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 18, 2020

Supportive co-founder and executive positions. Member of the Advisory Board. Every startup needs two or three key advisors who have the domain experience, connections, and complementary skills to guide the founders through those early crises. Manage customer service. Marketing and sales to Gen-Y customers.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 29, 2020

Maintaining your team’s passion and freedom to focus first on innovating for customers are only a couple of the reasons for thinking hard before you seek money from crowdfunding, angel investors, venture capital organizations, or attempt to qualify for a public stock offering. Investors want board seats and a vote on key decisions.

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Bootstrapping Advisory Board Venture Capital Startup 310

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 1, 2014

Supportive co-founder and executive positions. Member of the Advisory Board. Every startup needs two or three key advisors who have the domain experience, connections, and complementary skills to guide the founders through those early crises. Manage customer service. Marketing and sales to Gen-Y customers.

Entrepreneur 266

Entrepreneur Advisory Board Dividend Angel Investor 266

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

But the thing I am most proud of about Rob is that he has taken a company with a uniquely talented founder & CTO – Nick Halstead – and managed to build a very tight working relationship with Nick where we drive world-class product development without having the usual founder / CEO conflicts. Between Board Meetings.

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Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 8, 2020

Many startup founders I know avoid establishing a formal advisory board or board of directors for as long as possible, with the excuse that this is just another burden, or it has more risk than value to the founder. Formalize the board process and meeting structure.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2021

The conversation got interesting when I asked, “How are you going to describe the product to potential customers in the concrete industry?” Do you know what if any of the features you mentioned actually matter to a potential customer?” Ask customers how they solve the problem today. There was silence for a moment.

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

For startup founders, it’s never too early to start thinking about putting together a target market advisory board. The target market advisory board should consist of 2–4 industry veterans who have connections to C-level execs and VPs in your target market. Never discount the power of a warm intro.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

Even with advantages that independent startups can never hope to match, including brand recognition, customers, financial capital, and distribution, I don’t often see the entrepreneurial passion for innovation, agility, and team perseverance exhibited by new startups. Assemble an engaged new venture advisory board.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&#

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 8, 2016

Maintaining your team’s passion and freedom to focus first on innovating for customers are only a couple of the reasons for thinking hard before you seek money from crowdfunding, angel investors, venture capital organizations, or attempt to qualify for a public stock offering. Investors want board seats and a vote on key decisions.

Bootstrapping 120

Bootstrapping Advisory Board Startup Venture Capital 120

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

A well-developed product architecture helps a startup to achieve rapid market/product fit by successfully appealing to customers (users). Vitally, startup teams must be absolutely certain that both customer and market validation have been achieved before declaring market/product fit. This is quite the balancing act.

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Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 127

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 31, 2017

Ask Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen about their first business, Traf-O-Data. I always recommend that a startup founder enlist an advisory board of three to five members, and I find that people who resist this help are not very resilient. They show resilience.

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Advisory Board Social Media Cofounder Technical Review 120

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 25, 2017

They identify and support high impact startups that need access to customers, mentors, training, and capital. Startups struggle to establish their value proposition , create and launch their pilots, and get first customers. Customer, staff, and operation growth present new challenges and require even greater amounts of capital.

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Miami Technical Review Software Review Artificial Inteligence 61

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

Thanks to all of the amazing founders, advisors, co-investors, corporate partners, and others that helped make 2018 an amazing year. To that point, we are most excited when our founders are able to go from slide deck to product-market fit and Series A and beyond. AWS Reinvent Survivor Dinner with founders, Fortune 500 execs, and VCs.

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Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. But like all great founders some of these insights are simply hallucinations.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

A well-developed product architecture helps a startup to achieve rapid market/product fit by successfully appealing to customers (users). Vitally, startup teams must be absolutely certain that both customer and market validation have been achieved before declaring market/product fit. This is quite the balancing act.

Framework 113

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 113

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2020

In my experience as an advisor to startups, the difference is almost always related to the founder and their execution strategy , more so than to the solution quality or the market. As you move from development to rollout, a team effort is required, including marketing, sales, funding, and customers. But even he started with just one.

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Advisory Board Agile Social Media Metrics 308

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. ” We certainly did. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. Evangelos : Yes.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 11, 2010

Many startups have an advisory board of sympathetic people with industry expertise, or people who enjoy mentoring, or people who donate a few services on the come. Once you take investment, you will also have a fiduciary board, with the responsibility of making the company successful. All problems will go away.

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Advisory Board Cofounder Phoenix Arizona 233

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2020

As a business investor, I look for investments where I see founders really holding their people accountable for their actions. It’s easy for you to blame someone else in the organization, economic conditions outside, or even overly demanding customers, when things are not going well.

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Advisory Board Due Diligence Retention Agile 283

Up and Running

MAY 10, 2012

Any organization can visit our site and launch a one-off campaign,” he explains, or subscribe to WeDidIt for unlimited campaigns and premium features like consultation and customized software. version, and talking to an advisory board and seed round investors already.” And they’re happy they did it.

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Small Business Advisory Board Employee Entrepreneur 142

BeyondVC

JANUARY 6, 2018

2017 was another year of growing, learning, investing and partnering with amazing founders. Once again, we are grateful to have the opportunity to work with so many amazing founders, advisors, co-investors, and other collaborators to bring the boldstart family together. 2017 Recap.

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Cloud Cofounder Portfolio Advisory Board 60

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? How many of their founders are still with their company? How many of their founders are still with their company? Do They Get Customer Development?

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Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

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San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 9, 2014

But the entrepreneurs that have “it” seem to be able to effortlessly get team members, investors, and customers to follow them anywhere. Entrepreneurs who “get it” are emotionally attuned to peers and customers, so that their gut-level instincts become informed judgments that move the business forward. Able to just “get it.”

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Advisory Board Founder Bandwidth .Net 253

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing. The founder had simply not done the work to validate a price and customer segment. Focus on collecting customer references.

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Technical Review Advisory Board Software Review Business Model 220

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Does customer communication need to change ? In the past any customer could talk to Tom or expected Tom to talk to them. Is that feasible?

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Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 17, 2013

Here’s a look at what a founder should be able to do: Development. Conduct customer interviews. Build an advisory board. Command a board room. Write Code. Build a server. Design a splash page. Assemble an email blast. Develop and track a funnel. Make decisions off cohort tracking. Write a blog post.

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Advisory Board Balance Sheet Term Sheet Entrepreneur 279

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 30, 2021

Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing. The founder had simply not done the work to validate a price and customer segment. Focus on collecting customer references.

Technical Review 399

Technical Review Product Advisory Board Business Model 399

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

Our founders realized that investors needed to learn interactively, on-demand, on very specific topics, and in an atmosphere of trust. Two: the founders – are they curious, do they love to learn, and ask lots of questions? So GLG started connecting our clients directly to the smartest people on any given topic.

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New York Technical Review Networking Advisory Board 114

Hunter Walker

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

Great founders are always recruiting. The “Customer Council” Advisor. A sales and marketing tactic as much (or even more) than a customer development one, try setting up a Customer Council Advisory Board. The “I’m Going To Recruit You Down the Road” Advisor.

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Advisory Board Equity Vesting Startup 150

Up and Running

MAY 20, 2014

Since much of the start-up playbook is about learning as much as you can as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to reach some important milestone, many founders, investors, and engineers look at a $200k, two-year program as an inefficient means to an uncertain end.

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Entrepreneur Advisory Board Silicon Valley New York 88