Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As the idea went from innovating on software & systems to launching a company to rolling it out in the field brought on Rahul Gandhi as his co-founder to physically launch the company. what your product & engineering thought they cared about and you adapt your offering.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2013

The founders had been responsible for gaining staggering scale in the past 3 years, having been trail-blazers in building a network of talent and an unrivaled understanding of the YouTube ecosystem. Needless to say I think Ryan is one of the most talented engineering leads in LA but I’d stack him against anybody in the Valley, too.

Video 320

Video Los Angeles Technical Cofounder CTO Hire 320

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 17, 2014

I’ll try to do a future blog post on some of my insights in watching Nanea enter the role and how the founders enabled her success. In our video we discussed leadership topics such as managing product and engineering teams, communication and company organization. Company Organization.

Technical Review 315

Technical Review Leadership Engineer RSS 315

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JUNE 21, 2014

Which engineers dialed it in before a big release because it was during July 4th weekend? ” Who cut you in on their bonus because even though you’re “just an sales engineer” they know you really deserved more credit for this deal. Our founder, Yves Sisteron, was my mentor and board member at my first startup.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

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FEBRUARY 6, 2013

Quick summary: Be careful not to have too many co-founders. I don’t think VCs care as much about co-founders & economics as people think. Engineering is critical but it is not everything. it’s the most expensive dilution you’ll ever face. I think they care that there is a deep bench of talent.

Cofounder 388

Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Blogs weren’t popularized yet so it was an oddity for me to read the founder of a software company spewing out advice. Joel met his co-founder for Fog Creek software and learned a valuable management lesson. Mark: Google had trouble dealing with customers and contracts because they historically were so engineering driven.

Software Review 285

Software Review Software St. Louis API 285

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SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

A Strong Pool of Tech Founders – Stating the obvious. I’ve had this conversation with several communities such as in San Diego where I believe there are way more qualified and talented engineers than available local capital to support them. What can you do to attract high-quality engineers who want something more?

Community 378

Community San Diego Silicon Valley Los Angeles 378

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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. It consists of a highly intelligent and opinionated founder – Nick Halstead. You may know how much to pay in cash or equity for your new VP Engineering.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

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FEBRUARY 24, 2019

Read the tea leaves on CEO / Founder psychology The job of running a startup is incredibly stressful and as an industry we’ve started to note the importance of mental health / wellness in our industry. I always try to establish my sense of “founder psychology” between board meetings. Founders are fighting and can’t work together?—?how

Cofounder 251

Cofounder Conversion Management Founder 251

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OCTOBER 8, 2014

The monetization engine of the Internet that powers the most profitable business perhaps in history was invented and perfected in Los Angeles and is what you now know as Google Ad Words. It may surprise you to learn that LA graduates more engineers than anywhere else in the country. Where do all of these engineers end up?

Los Angeles 376

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Seattle 376

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MAY 19, 2013

My internal compass has always steered me strongly toward the belief that founders who can scale with their startup companies are better to back that founders who eventually need to hire a CEO. Very few founder CEOs go into the job ever expecting to give up their seat. We set out to find Jonathan’s “co-founder.”

Technical Review 303

Technical Review Cofounder Analytics Founder 303

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. We are predisposed to backing founders who solve problems in which they have personal knowledge that is authentic.

Cofounder 207

Cofounder Differentiation Hosting Design 207

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

You know, the weird thing, Derek, and I should probably let you speak some time, but I was deeply technical when I went into Andersen consulting, and I got paid much less than engineers who graduated, because I had a degree in economics. They paid engineers $4,000 more entry-point. Engineering vs. non-engineering. [00:10:32]

Cofounder 337

Cofounder Technical Cofounder San Diego Startup 337

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write this post since September of last year when Brad Feld first wrote about the The Founders Visa Movement. TWTFelipe is the founder of TWTApps , who had developed some really cool add-on applications for Twitter to extend its functionality. university in math or science&# (Thomas Friedman).

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Canada Green South Carolina 282

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SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

. “We’re all equal co-founders and we don’t care about titles.&# Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc. Functional roles provide more clarity around roles and responsibilities. and my favorite].

Operations 292

Operations CTO Hire Startup Early Stage 292

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 29, 2012

We sat down for an hour to talk about why what GaiKai built was able to overcome its much better funded rival and to dispel the myth that great engineering teams don’t exist in Southern California. GaiKai had 50 such engineers, which was a large part of its success. Everyone follow him @scottedwalker.

Southern California 279

Southern California Detroit Los Angeles California 279

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Most experienced VCs won’t push you to give up founder control at this stage of the business nor should they. Founder’s perspective. You’ll get empathy. Experience. Relationships.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

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JUNE 3, 2010

We had Farb Nivi , who is the founder & CEO of Grockit , a website that enables online group learning. Farb is the founder & CEO of Grockit.com. Current round: $3.35mm in Series A by TomorrowVentures (Eric Schmidt’s personal investment vehicle), Saban Ventures, Founder Collective, SK Telecom Ventures. LibreDigital.

Founder 214

Founder San Diego SMS Los Angeles 214

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JULY 12, 2011

This week I sat down with Chris Dixon, co-founder / CEO of Hunch and Partner at Founder Collective in the most recent installment of This Week in Venture Capital. 2. Chris then discussed his time as founder and CEO of SiteAdvisor, his first venture-backed startup. Such that during that time, Chris “learned how to learn.”.

Technical Review 281

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Cofounder API 281

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. Beyond that he (and thus engineering) could simply tell me, “No.” When companies start the founder & CEO is often the only mouthpiece for the business. I did this. ” PR.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 5, 2010

Also, founders who pitch me when they themselves live in separate locations don’t get very far with me. Outsourcing early often happens when you have non-technical founders who don’t know how to get code out the door. CEO, VP Products and CTO must all be in the physical location. If they’re not I won’t fund.

Distribution 335

Distribution Offshore CTO Hire Bulgaria 335

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome, our guest is Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement. 46:50 Engines of Growth. Oh, and if you didn’t guess, the title, “if you don’t have a discrete hypothesis you are incapable of failing” is, of course, an Eric Ries quote. There are many in this episode. Check it out.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

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MAY 13, 2010

Take Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo! Your sales team is pounding the table because engineering won’t ship new features fast enough. Engineering is pissed off because they need to do some technical infrastructure improvements and the sales team is always pushing them to deliver too many features. &# Sell what we have!!

Entrepreneur 330

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley United States Technical Review 330

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SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Hint: 60 million US Latinos driving US growth engine) I am beyond excited to announce the Herb Scannell has agreed to move from NYC to Los Angeles to take on the role of CEO at mitú, the fast growing Latino digital media company, serving more than 100 million monthly unique viewers. Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO.

United States 269

United States North America South America Los Angeles 269

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

Clearly the founders and senior executives of a company are the most valuable resources and their time should be maximized on the most valuable tasks. I watched Ophir Tanz achieve much in his early days at the Founder & CEO at GumGum, which has now become quite a large business. I have written about the next phases many times.

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

“Why do founders want to take the VCs’ money? Founders will continue to take the “growth at all options” path that leads to privacy & trust creep at places like Quora. Growth, again. The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. million and then $5.9

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

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AUGUST 17, 2009

These periods of time can leave a founder very vulnerable in the future. These same people will join you and your one other co-founder (maximum) 6 months later when you’ve established the company, done your Powerpoint deck, built a prototype or product and started fund raising discussions. Founder vesting.

Founder Vesting 365

Founder Vesting Intellectual Property Stock Options IP 365

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SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

As VCs we’re inundated with emails from founders, friends, colleagues, angels, seed investors, VCs, law firms, venture banks, corporates and so forth with their favorite deals. .” What do I mean? Defense is when you react to others. It’s inbound. It’s responding to somebody else with the ball. Play the long game.

Technical Review 317

Technical Review Incubator IPO Email 317

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Such was my recent meeting with Seth Sternberg, founder & CEO of Meebo. And I’d recommend them to any talented startup founders out there.&#. With three co-founders, what was decision making and roles and responsibilities like? In the early days, decision-making was made by consensus by all three co-founders.

Connecticut 286

Connecticut Cofounder Silicon Valley Web 286

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

This applies to both founders and to VC’s that work with them. I helped make this decision by “triangulating&# between our DBA, lead technical architect and our VP of Engineering (who had a better grasp of the financial costs & development costs of each decision).

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

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. This is probably because many founders are product or technology people. I often hear early stage founders telling me about their initial sales successes.

Hiring 346

Hiring Sales Startup Early Stage 346

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SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

by Michael Woolf that is worth any startup founder reading to get a sense of perspective on the reality warp that is startup world during a frothy market such as 1997-1999, 2005-2007 or 2012-2014. Burn rate in case you don’t know is the amount of money a company is either spending (gross) or losing (net) per month. (it

Burn Rate 383

Burn Rate Balance Sheet .Net Valuation 383

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MAY 13, 2013

I’m supposed to believe that my best innovation can only come from scores of startup founders who just made millions and have now become CVOs at my company? Many buying companies price these deals on the basis of $1 million per engineer on the team for an early-stage deal. Most founders stay the least amount of time they can.

Liquidation Preference 357

Liquidation Preference Early Stage Retention Lock-up Period 357

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APRIL 26, 2016

The key to being able to run a business that isn’t yet profitable (on operating margin) is availability of capital to finance losses and preferably at a cost that isn’t too punitive to the founders and employees. The reason one would accept losses is when they are investments in fueling faster growth.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I said that at the Founder Showcase, too. And for many of these they were (over) funded 7-10 years ago and don’t necessarily all represent great returns for investors or founders. some founders lose their life savings. That’s not true.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 16, 2016

One of the most obvious to me was Nanit, that was brought to our firm by my colleague Jordan Hudson who met them team, fell in love with their founders & technology, and encouraged us to invest. His co-founder and COO, Andy Berman , made the smart move from being a young VC to becoming an entrepreneur.

Jordan 150

Jordan CTO Hire Cofounder 150

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MAY 15, 2010

StackOverflow is a free Q&A site for software developers, blending functionality from wikis, blogs, forums, and social voting (similar to Digg/Reddit); 7.1mm unique visitors per month; new funds will be used to build out engineering team and build out product. I first discovered it from Dharmesh Shah’s blog OnStartups.

Stealth 285

Stealth SEC Advertising Accredited Investor 285