Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2013

For the entire first year after I funded the company he refused to take a salary and I had to admonish him to make sure he paid his expenses. Yet with major advances in our product infrastructure we still hadn’t proven we could scale sales. I funded Jonathan’s first $500,000. ” So true. chapter unfold.

Technical Review 303

Technical Review Cofounder Analytics Founder 303

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

It freed up Ophir to grow out our sales organization, to work more closely with agencies, to innovate on product and to raise capital. The last thing you want the CEO (or heads of sales, marketing, product) doing is sinking 3 days every month into preparing board packs. Here’s the dilemma. You created the damn product!

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Whereas New York City has very high real estate costs and very high salaries, launching in Chicago and D.C. It wasn’t just front-end processes like sales tools, marketing funnels, dynamic pricing, driver routes and so forth but we also had to build comprehensive systems to manage numerous warehouses across four different cities.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 14, 2018

Detailed roadmap of features you plan to build Detailed customer information Salary information Any other information you wouldn’t want seen or know by your competitors or a larger audience In short, there is nothing in your deck that should give you pause or make you feel like you can’t just send the damn file to somebody.

IP 239

IP Differentiation Salary Sales 239

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 28, 2009

Our sales forecasts were revised downward – many times. Join because you’ll make a good not great salary. Our customers were generally happy but they were pushing us hard for promised features. Our business development discussions took longer than planned. Reporters were no longer interested in talking about B2B eCommerce.

PR 331

PR Software Review Ireland Germany 331

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Also, it’s harder to pay a $30 million pre-money value on an unproved company when you see public companies with $100 million in sales trading for less than $20 million.

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

I’d also double the salaries of all highly qualified math and science teachers, staple green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who graduate from any U.S. The world’s best brains are on sale. university in math or science — instead of subsidizing their educations and then sending them home&#. Let’s buy more!&#.

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Canada Green South Carolina 282

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior 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 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

But putting no time into anchoring your beliefs because you’re too busy executing sales, marketing, support, product & engineering is an easy recipe for leadership drift. You can’t just overpay every person’s salary. We could all do better – I’m sure. Conviction. You can’t make everybody an SVP.

Leadership 150

Leadership Southern California San Diego Hiring 150

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2011

Low salary. The truth is that in my experience very, very few people really enjoy the “pure&# startup environment: months with no salary, months with no live product and lots of trial, error & rejection. My SVP of Sales & Marketing quit 30 minutes before an important board meeting. And a comfortable salary.

Entrepreneur 384

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 384

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

If Ventro was worth $8 billion on $2 million of sales surely a paltry $1 billion would suffice. Obviously I’m not talking about your most senior 3-5 employees who hopefully own meaningful stakes, are making salary sacrifices and have the experience in understanding stock option nuances. I think they believed it, too.

Stock Options 294

Stock Options Stock Valuation Liquidation Preference 294

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 11, 2012

So if you hire a senior sales rep with 100% bonus on top of their $150,000 base salary they want to get paid $100,000 (33% of $300,000). Why should I pay 2x the price to hire a VP of sales as I would pay to hire a VP of Market, Technology or Finance? I have never signed a contract on these terms.

Mexico 305

Mexico Term Sheet Hiring Search 305

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 19, 2009

And the end of the story was ultimately a successful sale of the company … so much of entrepreneurship is not sexy but brutal. You want that key marketing resource from Google but he’s on a fat salary that you can’t match. Inspiration/ Leadership – As an entrepreneur you’re always under-resourced.

Entrepreneur 288

Entrepreneur Early Stage Leadership Salary 288

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2011

Low salary. The truth is that in my experience very, very few people really enjoy the “pure&# startup environment: months with no salary, months with no live product and lots of trial, error & rejection. My SVP of Sales & Marketing quit 30 minutes before an important board meeting. And a comfortable salary.

Entrepreneur 176

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 176

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

They looked at total cost to the student and lost wages and then they plotted the incremental increases in salary that students who graduated got over the course of their careers. I do find it strange that the most valuable skill for any employee in any company isn’t emphasized AT ALL in my experience: sales.

NPV 337

NPV Chicago Balance Sheet Database 337

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2010

We then walked through our sales pipeline and discussed major campaigns. Most people are visual thinkers and being able to see things like revenue, total sales pipeline, conversion rates, error rates or whatever the measure, putting it in a time series graph helps people to quickly digest business performance. Then competition.

Startup 331

Startup Balance Sheet Forecast Early Stage 331

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2010

If no financing happened then this “note&# may not be converted and thus would be senior to the equity of the company in the case of a bankruptcy or asset sale. You’ve kept a really low burn rate and paid yourself a very small salary. It starts as a debt instrument (e.g.

Startup 290

Startup Burn Rate Warrant Bankruptcy 290

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

I was paid less in salary in 2004 than I was paid at the job I quit in 1999 (a job I had held 8+ years). But in our first year of sales (and those were really shitty years to be selling software) we sold $2.1 I learned how to establish sales targets and how to manage a sales pipeline. I never built Google.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Hiring Software Review Stock Options 285

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

My starting salary was $27,000. I told her I wasn’t yet convinced that she’d make a good: product manager, designer, sales person, leader, CEO. For 1991 I was very technical and also had a lot of practical business implementation experience in technology. I recently had this chat with a young friend of mine. Persistent?

Marketing 385

Marketing Europe Engineer Networking 385

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

I’m looking for somebody who can sell, but not better than our head of sales. You want somebody who can raise $15 million to build out your R&D, business development and sales organizations. And then I sneezed and he’s hired a kick-ass sales team. You want somebody who can lead teams on three continents.

Leadership 363

Leadership CTO Hire Technical Review Cofounder 363

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

This is part of my ongoing series on startup advice but also filed under my sales & marketing posts. The only problem is that you can’t afford all of these expensive direct sales reps to go and sell it. Sort of amortizing the costs of their sales reps over more products. You decide to go out and hire a sales rep.

Channel 293

Channel Startup Sales Partner 293

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 10, 2013

It would be yet another distraction for this fledgling CEO and he felt he needed to focus on biz dev, sales, marketing and fund raising. Another $100,000 in drained money (salary plus benefits of just one poorly contributing individual). I can’t afford to lose my head of sales right now – who would pick up the leads?

Vesting 344

Vesting Cofounder Salary Sales 344

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

Look beyond California and you have group purchasing (GroupOn in Chicago, LivingSocial in Washington DC), private sales (Gilt Groupe in NY, HauteLook in LA), artisan marketplaces (Etsy in NY), eCommerce (Amazon in Seattle) and on and on. Each of these companies exited for more than $500 million and several north of $1 billion.

Silicon Valley 313

Silicon Valley Southern California Los Angeles Semantic 313

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 9, 2010

That is excluding a single line of code or paying any salaries. When I started my first company in 1999 we spent more than $2 million on technology infrastructure including Sun servers & Solaris operating system, Oracle databases, EMC storage, load balancers, app servers, back-up devices, disk mirrors and on and on. We raised $16.5

Cloud 343

Cloud Technical Review Database Semantic 343