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The Audacious Plan to Make Electricity as Easy as WiFi

Both Sides of the Table

Meredith came to see me along with the CTO Marc Berte. Did anybody hold patents that would prevent us from using this technology? I seldom hire patent attorneys during due diligence but this was too important. We hired IP specialists to review prior art. We grilled their IP attorneys. It was impressive.

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Remind Me Why I Love You? (Why “In Person” is Everything)

Both Sides of the Table

You race back to the office to tell everybody how well it went and you wait for the follow-up call to have a partners’ meeting or talk about term sheets or at least dip into due diligence. Last time we met I didn’t have my CTO with me. Would it be alright if I brought her by your offices for a super quick coffee?”

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Webinar Recap: 14 Tips on How to Pitch and Get Funded

Up and Running

Another assumption is that you’ve actually conducted due diligence on your own business, and these are the areas of your team, financials, your competition, your IP, market trends, because the best pitches I’ve ever delivered were when investors were raising their hands and asking me questions about, “How is your IP protected?”

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CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire.NET programmers

blog.expensify.com

I think the real moral of this story is, (1) if you want to work at a startup, make sure the CTO cares about problem solving and not technology religion, (2) if you’re cooking steaks on a gas grill and you see your CTO warming up a dead squirrel over a book of matches, starting looking for a new job. What did we do?

Java 107