Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2009

In my experience most advisory boards under deliver relative to expectations. OK, so I’m sure some of you have wonderful experiences with your advisers. Others must echo my experiences. So do advisory boards really add value? And if you decide to have one how do you best implement it? Just don’t lay it on thick.

Advisory Board 306

Advisory Board Startup Equity Valuation 306

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 15, 2009

More likely it would be people with more experience. Or they need to be going into a scaling up mode. I think that most first time entrepreneurs won't necessarily get the gap between their idea and what you could do. They want to do their second or third but need someone to do the real work/lifting. Or maybe not.

Los Angeles 179

Los Angeles Southern California Management Product 179

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 14, 2009

They’re there to become more knowledgeable about your business since they may end up doing analysis down the road and also to get a bit of experience. Mine comes from the experience of watching discussions get totally skewed or torpedoed by observers. Anyone else have good/bad experiences? Is it just me?

Advisory Board 215

Advisory Board Strategic Investors Venture Capital Later Stage 215

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

One of the divisions, responsible for the company’s large accounts, was requesting data about a recent experiment that had been conducted by another division. Worse, nobody was quite sure exactly which customers had been exposed to the experiment. No experiment can run longer than a specified amount of time (usually a few weeks).

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

When I founded my first company along with Brian Moran (whose idea it was) I had no real experience running startups. This can often happen when there is a good product built but no real customer adoption yet. This is what happened to me. I had worked for Accenture building computer systems for large corporations.

Founder 299

Founder Technical Review Startup Venture Capital 299

Altgate

OCTOBER 15, 2009

There were six lessons that I talked about during the talk: Defining a mission Evolving an organization Knowing your customer Working hard, but not too hard Managing risk versus reward Having a can-do attitude I used the context of my experience on the U of M solar car team almost 20 years ago to share some advice on how to address these topics.

Michigan 34

Michigan Cofounder Venture Capital Engineer 34

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I always thought a company with lots of resources may go doing this very differently but reading about your experience helps to validate my ideas about business development. Reply Siddharth Chawla , on October 13, 2009 at 9:34 pm Said: Wow, this is really validating of how I go about finding things. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn [.]

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147