article thumbnail

Essential Skills for Building a Successful Startup

The Startup Magazine

Financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting are all necessary components of financial analysis, and understanding these aspects can give you a better overview of the state of your business. Running a business will likely mean simultaneously juggling between different projects, especially during the early stages.

Startup 104
article thumbnail

Further Thoughts on Startup Operations

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote a post about why I didn’t think early-stage startups should have COOs. This person can do budgeting, forecasting, strategic planning, legal, HR, office moves, etc. Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How Boards Need to Evolve Over Time

Both Sides of the Table

The functions of an early-stage board are pretty obvious and well understood: Providing introductions to customers, biz dev partners, recruits, the press, other investors, etc. Brett was formerly SVP of the Marketing Cloud at Salesforce with an enormous organization of sales, marketing, implementation, sales engineers, etc.

article thumbnail

Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars: Understanding Salespeople at Startups

Both Sides of the Table

Most technology startups seem to be founded by three types of people: product managers, engineers or biz dev types (MBAs and the like). Very few of them are started, in my experience, by sales people and very few early stage companies really understand sales. And in my experience Journeyman are not good in two scenarios.

article thumbnail

Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Reps May Not Work

Both Sides of the Table

One of the biggest mistakes I see early-stage startups making is hiring “seasoned&# sales professionals or hiring people too senior, too early. The problem is that in an early stage business there probably isn’t a perfect fit between your early product and a customer’s needs.

Hiring 346
article thumbnail

On Funding?—?The Denominator Effect

Both Sides of the Table

The thesis is that before investing in an early-stage startup it is close to impossible to know which of the deals you did will break out to the upside. You’ll find engineers out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, Caltech or execs out of UCLA, Spelman, NYU, etc. to start their next company. Now let’s assume you take 10 meetings.

article thumbnail

People Management: Startup Teams Should Dip but not Skip

Both Sides of the Table

A good early-stage CEO needs to be accessible, to be accountable for producing results and should be establishing the cultural norms of the company through direct leadership at all levels. We all like to think of startups as “non hierarchic&# organizations and to some extent that should be true. This led to a lot of human error.

CTO Hire 308