Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

Burstly, a Santa Monica based company, provides an open and free ad management platform that helps mobile application developers better monetize their inventory. He has many of the attributes I look for in an entrepreneur and importantly he has deep domain experience in ad management. I’ll explain in detail below.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 26, 2010

Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions&# and is also one of the most important techniques in acquiring customers in your company. We would take every day users from our customer base and make them heroes. If you didn’t read that yet it might be worth having a quick skim as a primer.

Customer 294

Customer Marketing Technical Review Iowa 294

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

We don’t want to compete for the largest AUM (assets under management) with the biggest firms in a race to build the “Goldman Sachs of VC” but it’s clear that this strategy has had success for some. But I thought a better way of thinking about how we manage our portfolios is to think about it as a funnel. super size or super focus.

Technical Review 416

Technical Review Pre-Money Valuation San Francisco Valuation 416

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

There is nothing more pure than building a product, putting it out in the world and seeing paying customers using your product and in some cases loving it. As companies get this initial customer feedback on their product they start to have to ask harder questions about unit economics: How much does it cost us to acquire a new customer?

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2017

In the early days this is expensive because the logistics & warehouses are amortized over a small customer base but with scale this infrastructure and the technology that drives it becomes a powerful moat and hard for new entrants to compete. years of software development. That’s some of what I suspect that team at 8VC saw in MakeSpace.

Technical Review 268

Technical Review Los Angeles Software Review Artificial Inteligence 268

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 20, 2020

Customers were happy and restaurants focused on their in-store business. The problem for the restaurants is that the more successful the “aggregators” of customer demand become over time, the less power the restaurants themselves have individually. they just put up with the food delivery company fees. so, too, are restaurants.

Technical Review 242

Technical Review Software Review Australia Aggregator 242

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

In those years I learned to properly build product, price products, sell products and serve customers. I am enjoying more discussions with startups about the ROI benefits for customers who use our products rather than the coolness of our products. Steve Jobs still walked from his house on Waverly to the Apple Store on University Ave.

Valuation 466

Valuation San Francisco Ratchet Liquidation Preference 466

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

The main thing you’re concerned about in this phase of your company is maintaing control of your board, which in a legalistic perspective is ensuring that founders & management have the majority of seats on the board. how to evolve our management team. Offering a sparring-partner function on strategic decisions. Mentorship.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2012

I always tell teams I meet with, “The scarcest resource in your company is management bandwidth. And nobody is more important in this regard than senior management. We need to hire a team in financial services now to address the needs of that industry [yeah, I know we don't yet have big customers there. Spend it wisely.”

Bandwidth 415

Bandwidth Management Startup Channel 415

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

The best technologists often aren’t amazing people managers. They work on their own schedule and are often hard to manage. They care about the quality of what is build more than they care about end customers. The VP Engineering aspires to manage teams. And first and foremost a VP of Engineering is a people manager.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2014

We focused together on improving our sales methodology, our training and our comp plans through a larger than life ex country manager from PTC named Kai Krickel. Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. Customers seldom buy on price.

Sales 382

Sales Startup Technical Review Matching 382

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

He wrote a post this long weekend on how he manages the board of DataSift. 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. Rob Bailey is the CEO of DataSift. You should read it. Email updates frequently.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

But if you level up , raise capital and grow customers, revenue and staff – life changes. You have this tension between on the one side being a micro-manager (by which great people won’t want to work with you) or being hands off (and having quality lapses or team alignment issues). And then there’s product management.

CTO Hire 385

CTO Hire Entrepreneur Technical Review Leadership 385

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

This might mean helping customers buy traffic, arb’ing deals, helping with RTB pricing or trading, etc. Minimize Any Custom Work That Will Not Feed Back Into Your R&D. While I’d like to say that you should never do custom work that changes the scope of your product that’s not wholly realistic.

Software Review 321

Software Review Software IP Technical Review 321

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2013

On my first real day back the first thought I have is that most entrepreneurs don’t manage their VC relationships as well as they could. It’s best to think of your VC partnership as a customer. I ask questions, test theories, debate topics of the day and then reflect upon what I’ve learned.

Management 309

Management Venture Capital Partner Boston 309

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

” So Ethan went to work as a product manager at Google Video. And because I wanted Ethan to be able to attract a great team, build & iterate a product, test it with initial customers and refine his strategy before having to take the wrappers off of his company. When Ethan was considering leaving Google we talked about it.

Southern California 359

Southern California San Francisco CTO Hire SEM 359

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

Neither is very strategic nor in the best interest of either set of customers that VCs have (portfolio companies & LPs). So he went on to become the CFO of Fab through their growth years dealing with warehousing, inventory management, facilities, CAC/LTV analyses and of course fund raising. Writing a book will be fun.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2010

In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical , requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on customer feedback. Or the sales decks will all be customized by your “feet on the street&# and won’t resemble the way you THINK your company is being positioned.

Sales 286

Sales PR Forecast Technical Review 286

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

In an early stage start I believe it’s the CEO’s job to manage these functions. It’s pretty tough to convince me in a company of less than 50 people that the CEO can’t handle 6-8 direct reports to manage the various areas of the business. So what does a COO at a startup do if the CEO should be managing things?

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Due Diligence 325

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

Here is where I see this really play out: Product Management. Eventually I had a head of Product Management – the best I ever worked with named Tim Barker – politely say to me that this wouldn’t fly any more. Allocation planning in product management in ingenious and helps a lot with CEO meddling. I did this.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

You Manage What you Measure. One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. Or they go in the opposite direction and spend too much time capturing & measuring data that isn’t used to make management decisions. Customer Acquisition.

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2010

I see way too many startup founders who don’t have experience in selling and probably don’t feel that comfortable going to customers and asking for orders. Spending time selling to customers is the best way to find out what their problems are and how good your solution currently is at mapping to their needs.

Hiring 346

Hiring Sales Startup Early Stage 346

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? I care about the thought that you’ve given to the customer problem.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

Back then it was a larger than life ex country manager from PTC named Kai Krickel. Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. They are as good at selling you as they are at selling your product to customers.

Sales 316

Sales Technical Review Matching Hiring 316

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2013

The point of PUCCKA was to develop a common methodology to make sure our whole team approaches sales with the same mindset and to give us a language to talk with each other about our prospects, as in, “have you identified your customers pain point yet?”. The goal is to get the customer speaking about their organization.

Sales 367

Sales Software Review Social Media Customer 367

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

So rather than hiring a VP Marketing [to establish a strategic marketing plan, build and manage the marketing team, manage outside vendors, etc.] I tell people that they need to blog about their industry to drive customers and not blog to their egos to drive their peer group to their blogs.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

Most technology startups seem to be founded by three types of people: product managers, engineers or biz dev types (MBAs and the like). These people take directions well from a sales manager on how to approach sales campaigns. They work through ROI calculations with customers. They are hugely process driven.

Early Stage 350

Early Stage Startup Sales Campaign 350

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 2, 2009

Twitter is the new CRM (customer relationship management) channel. The volume of Tweets is enormous and growing at a rapid pace so tools are emerging to help brands manage this information. This is most likely done outside of the automated processes that you can manage on Twitter and probably warrants a phone call.

Conversion 235

Conversion Management Social Network Philadelphia 235

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2019

But gone are the days where VCs put dollars into companies and ask founders to step aside quickly so that the VC can install their favorite management team. The board also needs to be mindful of the interests of other “stakeholders” including debt holders, employees, customers and suppliers. Is it possible that you get fired?

Venture Capital 236

Venture Capital Startup Angel Investor Silicon Valley 236

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2013

” For starters OpenTable had an advantage in that the restaurants back then needed an IT system to help with table management (the restaurant layout, table configurations, etc.) But it’s not as easy as you think to be “the OpenTable of X.” That is what we set out to solve at MyTime. With smart phones everybody does.

Development Team Review 324

Development Team Review Los Angeles San Francisco Mobile 324

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc. As management your job is to make sure that everybody understands how their initiatives tie into the overall company strategy.

Development Team Review 323

Development Team Review SEM Channel Social Media 323

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

In a way it seems the model has been bring in professional management to help a company through a growth spurt while technical founders focus on becoming an industry leader in terms of innovation and then when the less experienced technical founder is ready they step back in the role. So the next chapter of DataSift is underway.

Founder 309

Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

It included one firm who I asked not to call Salesforce.com as a reference (they were our largest pilot customer) and in their kindness they called Marc Benioff (the CEO) and asked his opinion. The managing partner of the firm called me the next day. we had about 25 firms contacting us – more than I could manage.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

My first company launched in 1999 and we were offering a SaaS document management in the cloud (we were called ASPs back then). I didn’t have first-hand experience in document management systems other than as a user and nobody had SaaS experience – the market was too new. I’ll always point out when I am.).

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2010

When I was running startups I felt like a horse with blinders on because I was super focused on the content management market and ignored many other markets. My job doesn’t involve the daily grind of customer complaints, product outages, business partner / channel problems, hiring / firing, etc.

Technical Review 312

Technical Review Due Diligence Spain Warrant 312

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

After a year in the market, MakeSpace was growing rapidly and our biggest issue was CAC (customer acquisition costs) relative to payback period (when we get our marketing investment back) and relative to LTV (lifetime value). They could try to figure out how to do logistics, warehouse tracking, photo-processing and route management.

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Clearly in an enterprise customer this is unlikely. The most likely outcome if you manage to interest the senior exec (for the sake of this post let me call her the CEO) is that she will refer you down the organization to somebody who would be involved in the decision.

Sales Cycle 375

Sales Cycle Sales Technical Review Campaign 375