Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 26, 2020

Public ownerships usually lends prestige and credibility to your sales, marketing, and acquisition efforts, but it may work counter to your vision of saving the world. Most startup founders voluntarily exit or are pushed out, and the fun is gone. The public company corporate culture may not fit you and your startup.

Cost 319

Cost IPO Exit Strategy Initial Public Offering 319

Berkonomics

OCTOBER 5, 2023

Fixed overhead for salaries, rent, equipment leases and more make up the majority of the “burn rate” (monthly expenses) for most companies. Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. The art of good management.

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Burn Rate Angel Investor Down Round 118

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 16, 2020

What are my top 5 expenses as a percentage of sales? Good targets include: Underperforming sales agents. This is done to eliminate administrative complexity, focus sales strategy, and reduce inventory. The ROI on cost savings is more compelling in a downturn, whereas the ROI on sales is more compelling during a growth cycle.

Recapitalization 172

Recapitalization Forecast Software Review Finance 172

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 5, 2014

Deferred payments start with stretching the payables period but, more importantly, include giving employee equity in lieu of a higher salaries and negotiating vendor deferred payments out of future revenues. Waiting until you have something to sell before bringing on a sales and operations staff. Social media is not rocket science.

Burn Rate 262

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Entrepreneur Salary 262

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 10, 2017

by Mark Gilbert, founder and CEO of MBS Accounting Technology & Advisory. Founders overlook how their salary looks to investors. >Investors If they see large expenses going into the founders’ pockets – and not into their business- investors will likely turn the other way.

Software Review 109

Software Review Technical Review Due Diligence Startup 109

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2014

This week I wrote about obsessive and competitive founders and how this forms the basis of what I look for when I invest. We had raised a $2 million seed round, which meant taking almost no salary so we could afford to hire staff. So even after raising a $16 million A-round I still paid myself a paltry salary. Literally. .

Founder 409

Founder Salary Startup Early Stage 409

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

No salaries followed by low salaries. ” Almost all startup founders experience a deep and prolonged sadness after selling their company , even when the sale is an outrageous success. The answer is important and fundamental for all startup founders, whether or not they ever intend to sell their company.

Software Review 295

Software Review Startup Cofounder Search 295

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. Every Flexible VC structure allows founders to access immediate risk capital while preserving exit, growth trajectory, and ownership optionality. . Flexible VC 102: Variations.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Deferred payments start with stretching the payables period but, more importantly, include giving employee equity in lieu of a higher salaries and negotiating vendor deferred payments out of future revenues. Waiting until you have something to sell before bringing on a sales and operations staff. Social media is not rocket science.

Burn Rate 120

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 120

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 28, 2010

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is the new book by David Cohen , founder and CEO of TechStars, and Brad Feld , managing director of Foundry Group. Below is his chapter, Avoid Co-Founder Conflict. A perennial favorite is to decide that each founder should own an equal share. For what reasons?

Cofounder 128

Cofounder Founder Equity Dilution 128

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 10, 2012

On top of that, budgets are siloed; the “Salaries” budget is separate from the “Tools” budget. As the startup founder, what do you do about all this? In any case, rarely is a simple “cost savings” equation the way you’re going to win sales or set price-points.

Software Review 256

Software Review Product Software Developers Software Development 256

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 4, 2022

Most great founders lived on Ramen noodles, without taking a salary, for longer than they like to remember. Arbitrary rewards, like salary bonuses or vacation perks, seem to just get in the way of achieving really great results. Making big money excites you, but is not your major driver.

Entrepreneur 304

Entrepreneur Salary Partner Global 304

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 1, 2022

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will likely come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Stock Options 343

Stock Options Advisory Board Stock Startup 343

The Next Web

FEBRUARY 1, 2014

You might have started searching for a tech-oriented co-founder to help you launch your idea, only to find that your startup can’t afford the ongoing salary for a skilled software developer. What drives sales for online services and mobile apps? Developer salaries are high and often out of reach for a startup business.

Web 160

Web Silicon Valley Salary Demand 160

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

- Make sure you go through the 32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder. A great post by Elizabeth Knopf , FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder where she breaks down the process much like how you think about a sales process. Hire a Product Design Lead First Nailing that elusive technical co-founder

Technical Cofounder 211

Technical Cofounder Cofounder CTO Hire Los Angeles 211

Both Sides of the Table

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. It’s your baby. You took the biggest leap of faith.

Technical Review 303

Technical Review Cofounder Analytics Founder 303

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 31, 2015

by Max Yoder, co-founder and CEO of Lesson.ly. Designed to give a “bird’s-eye view” of reviews, posts and engagement from all the biggest social platforms, Perch will also alert business owners to what the competition is doing for just a fraction of the cost of a new employee’s salary. Proposal solutions: Tinderbox.

Software Review 100

Software Review Technical Review Social Media Cofounder 100

SoCal CTO

MARCH 2, 2015

I’ve written quite a bit about aspects of this topic, especially from the perspective of startup founders looking for talent – you can find these in: Startup CTO. What you should be gathering from this is that looking for a job is more of a sales process than anything else and there are no easy answers.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Los Angeles CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 150

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. Whereas New York City has very high real estate costs and very high salaries, launching in Chicago and D.C. were more distributed.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. How do I build a repeatable, scalable sales process that is like an industrial machine - not a crafts project? 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 12, 2014

Working at Netegrity was an invaluable learning experience, and the salary and benefits gave me a level of disposable income and financial security that I’d never had as an independent consultant. I was still doing consulting work and built a point-of-sale and CRM system for a local cellular retailer.

Angel Investor 273

Angel Investor Security Cofounder Salary 273

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 14, 2012

So many tech startups begin the same way: One founder, one dream and a plan to make it happen. You will have the most chance for success by maximizing the number of founders with complementary skill sets. Most businesses stay that way - there are many more solo entrepreneurs than business owners with employees.

Technical Review 159

Technical Review CTO Hire Software Review Startup 159

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 7, 2017

by Hannah Sieber, co-founder and COO of EcoFlow Tech. My company, EcoFlow Tech, raised more than one million in sales and achieved our goals of getting customer feedback and generating buzz. However, having a high top-line sales numbers doesn’t necessarily mean you will hit your goals, or even that your campaign was a success.

Campaign 122

Campaign San Francisco Technical Review Flash 122

Hearpreneur

AUGUST 20, 2023

4- Find the right relationships Photo Credit: Mike Pio Roda “Never leave money on the table” might seem tempting, but it's not always the wisest path for founders and business owners. Initial perfection is an unrealistic goal and most of my learnings were devised after I started testing strategies and making sales.

Entrepreneur 77

Entrepreneur Cap Table Dividend Cofounder 77

Transformify

MARCH 23, 2020

Traveling around the world, I met startup founders, forex traders, marketers, online shop owners, travel bloggers, Instagram influencers and digital business entrepreneurs of all kinds. Speaking of sales and business development, during the first few years, it was hard to convince businesses to create remote jobs.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review Croatia San Francisco Software Review 132

Hunter Walker

MAY 13, 2023

I was on both sides of these transactions – buying startups for Google/YouTube and angel investing in high quality technical founders. In fact, sometimes acquirers are asking for the remaining cash on hand from the startup in order to ‘zero out’ the salary burden they’re taking on [HW note: 99.9%

Early Stage 117

Early Stage Cap Table Acquisition Sales 117

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

So we as VCs search for entrepreneurs/founders who have the whole package or as much of it as possible. They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. It’s lost salary for a period of time. Pay me half salary until the fund is closed. Few people have it.

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur CTO Hire South America Salary 293

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

For some aspiring to be tech entrepreneurs, I often suggest a two-step process, as I argued in this post that “ The First Startup Founder You Need to Invest in Is You.” The narrative of this discussion is something like this: I meet a 35-40-year-old founder with two kids and mortgage.

Technical Review 150

Technical Review Liquidation Preference Silicon Valley IP 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418

Startup Revenue Technical Review Flash 418

YoungUpstarts

MAY 2, 2017

by Reuben Yonatan, founder and CEO of GetVoIP and GetCRM. Sales representatives literally represent your company and its values, so you never want to hire anyone – especially those who are customer-facing – who would take either lightly. Here are just a few ways you can entirely avoid that issue: 1. Check their history.

Hiring 104

Hiring Sales Salary Networking 104

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 7, 2020

Most great founders lived on Ramen noodles, without taking a salary, for longer than they like to remember. Arbitrary rewards, like salary bonuses or vacation perks, seem to just get in the way of achieving really great results. Making big money excites you, but is not your major driver.

Salary 317

Salary Partner Entrepreneur Global 317

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance. For background, see Revenue-Based Investing: A New Option for Founders who Care About Control. Decathlon Capital.

Revenue 60

Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Social media facilitates marketing and sales. As an old rule-of-thumb, startups realized that employees cost double the salaries paid, to cover office costs, health-care benefits, and workers compensation. Servers needed expensive IT consultants for setup and maintenance, and required excessive power and cooling.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 14, 2019

It is estimated that at least 80% of all startups rely on personal funds from their founders for operations, albeit in their formative stages. If you need any money from this account, let it be in the form of a salary. A large number of startups are often funded by the people that believe in their founders the most.

Balance Sheet 128

Balance Sheet Limited Liability Company Bootstrapping Startup 128

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 14, 2014

Over the years as an investor, I have come to realize just how much a start-ups’s DNA is driven by the original founders. The personalities, strengths, and focus of those first founders shape a business long after the individuals have moved on. News DNA founders founding team Marketing product start-ups UI'

Founder 136

Founder Salary Sales Revenue 136

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Or they may even put the entire company up for sale. Often the short-term cuts directly affect employee salaries, jobs, and long-term investment in R&D. Newly public tech companies are now going public with dual-class stock, which allows the founders to have more voting rights than the general public.

Institutional Investors 233

Institutional Investors Dividend Stock Technical Review 233

The Startup Lawyer

JUNE 9, 2010

A startup’s Series A financing shouldn’t be a large liquidity event or salary payday for the startup’s founders. While a startup typically receives millions of dollars in a Series A, if too much of that $$$ flows guaranteed to the founders, various incentives get out of whack. Case Study.

Salary 99

Salary Term Sheet Liquidation Preference Liquidity Event 99