Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. So he would allocate say – 20% to sales, 15% to marketing, 20% to eng priorities, 10% to customer support, 10% to ops, 20% to ‘platinum customers’ and maybe 5% directly to me as the CEO.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

.&# Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc. I usually encourage people to think about titles like, “Founder & CTO&# or “Founder & VP Marketing.&#. Functional roles provide more clarity around roles and responsibilities.

Operations 292

Operations CTO Hire Startup Early Stage 292

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2016

When we met Shireen (CEO) and Scott (Co-founder & CTO) in late 2014 they had been inspired to create Nima to address their own personal food issues and empower other people to live their healthiest lives. It’s still in pre-sale, but reception from beta testers, previews and the industry ( tech and consumer ) has been enthusiastic.

Cofounder 207

Cofounder Differentiation Hosting Design 207

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2016

The rest of our team included the founding CTO of Maker Studios (Ryan Lissack) and the CEO of DataSift (Tim Barker) so we seemed to all be in good company of ex Salesforce execs looking to make a difference. For some of my more skeptical portfolio companies I simply asked them to run a trial of inbound sales calls and they were shocked.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Fractional CTO Cofounder Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

But during the funding process we certainly asked whether Nick was open to hiring a US-based CEO so that Nick could focus on engineering prowess and leadership and not having to build out a sales, marketing & support organization in the US. You’ll see more news from the company over the coming months.

Founder 309

Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

In revenue terms our first two years of sales were $2.1 Ryan Lissack is the CTO of Maker Studios. And it launched this author’s career and taught me everything I know about sales, marketing, hiring, firing, fund raising and so on. million and then $5.9 Not Google. But a tremendous experience for everybody involved.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One other big tell for me is the CEO’s grasp of the sales pipeline. I can’t tell you how many CEO’s I’ve met with who can’t walk me through the details of their sales pipeline. Who does sales report to? Who does finance report to? You’re slitting that stuff? Then what does COO mean?

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Your CTO and leading technology visionary has just announced he’s quitting. I have often said that fund raising (like any sales process) can be related back to human instincts and therefore explained via dating analogies. A company has just filed suit against you for product patent infringement (obviously more serious).

Technical Review 311

Technical Review Venture Capital Due Diligence Partner 311

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. These are often amazingly talented people who are really strong in some of the skill areas and there is no shame in this. Great companies are comprised of great individual point people or functional leaders.

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur CTO Hire South America Salary 293

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2018

If you presented on your own but have a very talented CTO perhaps your follow up is to bring by your CTO to show why the tech you’ve built is truly unique. That way your VC meeting becomes a sales lead AND the VC can get input from a trusted source (a portfolio company) without having to immediately commit more time.

Portfolio 261

Portfolio IP Later Stage Email 261

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 22, 2010

The more senior members you have (say you already have a CEO, CTO, VP marketing, VP Biz Dev, VP Products) then the less options you’ll need and vice versa. This states how the proceeds from a sale or dissolution of the company will be distributed. That’s normal. Those options need to come from somewhere.

Valuation 405

Valuation Liquidation Preference Pre-Money Valuation Term Sheet 405

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. Another called Parker Harris, the co-founder and CTO. I had planned a balance of large companies and SMB/divisional sales but have changed my thinking. My blog was wiped out.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 25, 2011

You can monetize via Google Ad Sales before you have enough revenue to build your own sales team. And I’m excited to say that we’ve poached a major technologist from Silicon Valley who will move down to Los Angeles join as CTO in January. You can get feedback from your audience and adjust based on their feedback.

Silicon Valley 291

Silicon Valley Los Angeles Distribution Internet 291

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Investors: Matrix (Dana Stadler, who was the CTO of PayPal). Jeremy Liew, a respected VC from LightSpeed, obviously saw the change to ramp up sales. 15mm in Series A. Read more: TechCrunch. Blippy is a service that allows you to automatically share your credit card transactions as you make them. 10mm in Series C.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

At the margin you can make yourself better at sales, product design, marketing, leadership, capital raising, etc. For example, I believe that the data on the studies of identical twins raised by different parents show that the IQ link is much more strongly correlated with DNA than the parents that raised you.

Silicon Valley 289

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur United States Leadership 289

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Of course everything could be replicated if a massive juggernaut like Amazon or Google wanted to pour all of their resources into it but I’m talking about technology that is hard to replicate, takes years of know-how and once adopted is significantly valuable. Why does that matter? Some start, some scale, some can do both.

IP 223

IP Intellectual Property IRR Cofounder 223

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2017

Raising money is a sale and selling requires persistence and follow up. The best sales people never give up and they are politely persistent in finding new ways to get in front of target buyers. It’s the exact same phenomenon in sales when you’re in a competitive RFP and 5 firms are pitching. Be in Person. Get Back in Person.

Burn Rate 238

Burn Rate Term Sheet CTO Hire Fractional CTO 238

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2021

It has historically been the case that VCs would rather fund the promise of 100x in a company with almost no revenue than the reality of a company growing at 50% but doing $20+ million in sales. Our goal is to produce a $10 billion+ winner and remain the market leader in this SaaS category of AI in Sales & Marketing.

Venture Capital 363

Venture Capital LP Valuation Later Stage 363

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

It wasn’t so much that I wanted to “rise to the next level” as I wanted to be able to lead at a higher-level by having time to spend thinking about how to really propel the business forward rather than always having my nose buried in a spreadsheet or having to lead all of the big sales campaigns. Then my CTO quit.

Founder 372

Founder Early Stage Campaign Leadership 372

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 10, 2013

He believed we had a weakness with his CTO. It would be yet another distraction for this fledgling CEO and he felt he needed to focus on biz dev, sales, marketing and fund raising. The CTO had at-will employment with no notice period. I can’t afford to lose my head of sales right now – who would pick up the leads?

Vesting 344

Vesting Cofounder Salary Sales 344

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 12, 2018

We would have gladly followed Jamie (and Josh Roth, the CTO who is phenomenal and we’ve also known for a decade) right through an IPO if we could have. Having recurring revenue allows you to keep the original purchase price down, which in turn increases sales. we were sold on the concept immediately.

Security 247

Security Los Angeles Silicon Valley Video 247

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

I’m looking for somebody who can sell, but not better than our head of sales. You want somebody who can raise $15 million to build out your R&D, business development and sales organizations. He took this as a challenge and had a CTO in one week. And then I sneezed and he’s hired a kick-ass sales team.

Leadership 363

Leadership CTO Hire Technical Review Cofounder 363

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 5, 2010

The conversations bleed into the sales messages the next time, they wend their way into software designs and form the plan of attach against competition. And from all the office chatter come norms and beliefs. CEO, VP Products and CTO must all be in the physical location. I prefer the first sales hires to be in the home office.

Distribution 335

Distribution Offshore CTO Hire Bulgaria 335