Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 28, 2011

As a rule, you need to review your burn rate every month, and manage it every day. The cost of giving up more equity early is often more than offset by the increased flexibility to recover from mistakes. Pay people with equity or future revenue. Investors assume it will only go up with more funding. Great strategy.

Burn Rate 231

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 231

VC Cafe

JULY 21, 2020

There are four general buckets for engaging with a corporate like Google: Funding – this consists of cash investment for equity. This most likely involves a combination of an operational team (cloud, enterprise, commerce, etc) and the corporate development team, led by Don Harrison.

Technical Review 131

Technical Review Startup Early Stage Cloud 131

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

As a rule, you need to review your burn rate every month, and manage it every day. The cost of giving up more equity early is often more than offset by the increased flexibility to recover from mistakes. Pay people with equity or future revenue. Investors assume it will only go up with more funding. Great strategy.

Burn Rate 120

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 120

The Equity Kicker

MAY 7, 2013

When our companies started switching from ‘waterfall’ to ‘agile’ development methodologies we went from having detailed pictures of how products were going to evolve (albeit with delivery risk) to little visibility of what new features would emerge and when.

Development Team Review 94

Development Team Review Business Plan Agile Operations 94

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

JANUARY 15, 2011

Investors use a consulting CTO for technical due diligence. And finally, you may be able to avoid diluting your equity. Preserve your equity by using a consulting CTO to ramp up your company before securing early-stage financing and hiring a permanent technology partner. Why are consulting CTOs so scarce?

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE 40

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

Even with these, you will have paper-tested your MVP, but the reality is that customers will not be able to assess the value to them until they actually use it. If you are on the lower complexity end, the key is defining small chunks of work that can be done quickly by a developer. Review the code being built.

Technical Cofounder 338

Technical Cofounder Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 338

venturehacks.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Breakups are hard If you’re going to fall out with your co-founder, do it early, recover the equity into the option pool to keep the company going, and recruit someone else great to fill the missing slot. Engineer heavy startups are common now, so doubling or tripling your development team at the outset is incredible.

Cofounder 101

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Technical Review 101

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

They log in to translate the documents, one at a time, marking each finished when done, which sends the file back to the company for review.” Also important: Only go for providers who have great reviews from many past customers. Decline bids from providers without many great reviews. The translator rejects or approves.

CTO Hire 84

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 84

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Honestly assess your own strengths and weaknesses thoroughly. And how do you do this?

Cofounder 66

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 66