YoungUpstarts

APRIL 17, 2018

by Felix Winstone, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Talkative. As a new entrepreneur or business owner, the most important thing you will do is hire talent. As a startup co-founder with a growing team, here are the recruiting tips I’ve learnt over the last couple of years. Hiring = Sales. Know When To Hire.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Elevator Pitch Hiring Dividend 164

David Teten

JULY 9, 2012

We are thus more likely to befriend those people, we are more likely to develop strong ties to them, and even eventually to marry one of those people. [1] Often, when startup founders first assemble teams, they hire familiar people – either people they know, or people like them.

Hiring 128

Hiring Technical Review Affiliate Audience 128

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2020

Hire a professional marketing and public relations agency once you have a good revenue stream but you don’t need them to start a free blog, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts with initial content and complete the basics of search engine optimization. Cash flow can be drastically reduced by working out of your garage.

Burn Rate 310

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Salary Angel Investor 310

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 2, 2019

Most of you aspiring entrepreneurs have no idea how dramatically your own role has to evolve as you develop a solution, start a business, and expect it to scale into a successful self-managed company. Thus my job as a small business advisor really is really more about getting you developed than perfecting the business.

Leadership 248

Leadership Technical Review Cofounder Social Media 248

View from Seed

MARCH 24, 2021

” Below are our favorite pieces from the past few years, divided in to a few key categories: fundraising, company building, product development, industry trends, and the life of a VC. Doing Reference Checks on VCs “Try to speak to at least one founder that the investor has worked with in a failed investment.

Seed Stage 177

Seed Stage Hiring IPO Analytics 177

Both Sides of the Table

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. Without strong PMs you build crappy products that nobody needs or that real people can’t use. Don’t hire a homogenous team. For the wrong reasons.

Cofounder 388

Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

Mucker Lab

MAY 28, 2020

This post originally appeared in TechCrunch back in 2015, written by our co-founder and managing partner Erik Rannala. Like a teenager with a million-dollar allowance and an identity crisis, a startup with too much capital and no product-market fit will become capable of making larger mistakes. Hire the wrong people.

Startup 78

Startup Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Review 78

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 241

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 241

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 29, 2018

Hire a professional marketing and public relations agency once you have a good revenue stream but you don’t need them to start a free blog, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts with initial content and complete the basics of search engine optimization. Cash flow can be drastically reduced by working out of your garage.

Burn Rate 223

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 223

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 4, 2016

The good news is that everyone expects entrepreneurs to make mistakes, since founders explore uncharted territory. In fact, investors recognize that founders usually learn more from mistakes than from success, so a well-explained startup failure can improve their odds of funding the next time around. Hire slow and fire fast.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Startup Forecast Angel Investor 120

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 24, 2014

by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. Most of us would want to hire the most experienced, cutthroat lawyer specializing in multimillion-dollar mergers. Adam Root has worked in development and design for Fortune 500 companies, midsize agencies, and startups. Professionalisms Adam Root Hiplogiq product development startup'

Fractional CTO 228

Fractional CTO Product CTO Hire Merger 228

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. He just hired Meg Whitman. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. The result?

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Over the years, we’ve worked with, and talked to thousands of founders just starting out. A collection of some of our greatest hits, and some new content, put into one helpful package for founders navigating building a company. The first guide we are releasing is around product. Thoughtful & Clever Product Experiences.

Early Stage 308

Early Stage Product Startup Hiring 308

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. And all of that cost was caused by one activity: hiring. Hiring is no different from any other company process. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it?

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. In this article we explore the unique challenges of a lean start-up and how Outsourced Product Development (OPD) can be used to overcome them. Reducing product turn time. Extending the runway. The Lean Start-Up Environment.

Product Development 153

Product Development Lean Developer Product 153

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. AskAnything.VC Is the service scaleable?

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

YoungUpstarts

MAY 3, 2017

by Bob La Loggia, founder and CEO of AppointmentPlus. From product development to market research, many startups are one-person operations in their early days. Perhaps you don’t have the budget to hire an assistant, or you’re simply reluctant to give up control of even the most mundane jobs. The result?

Technical Review 113

Technical Review Management Arizona Software Review 113

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 5, 2014

Hire a professional marketing and public relations agency once you have a good revenue stream but you don’t need them to start a free blog, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts with initial content and complete the basics of search engine optimization. Cashflow can be drastically reduced by working out of your garage.

Burn Rate 262

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Entrepreneur Salary 262

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2022

That’s where I see too much entrepreneur burnout, growth plateaus, and founders being replaced, to their chagrin. According to one study a decade ago, only 45% of founders plan to exit after stage one, and my guess is that less than half the remainder survive the next stage in their own company. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 368

Mezzanine Private Equity Bandwidth Metrics 368

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. Are we solving the right problem? We can do better by focusing on process instead of personality.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Version One Ventures

AUGUST 26, 2016

There’s a lot of debate surrounding the right time to bring executive level hires into your start-up. With that said, here are some general guidelines I have developed over the years for building a management team. First, your hiring/team building strategy should follow two key rules. 2 nd hire: VP of Finance.

Part-Time VPE 60

Part-Time VPE Management Finance Vertical 60

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 16, 2016

This term refers to an initial venture-capital investment, often wrongly sought to seed early product development. In fact, most often, it is limited to seeding a startup business rollout or scale-up after development is completed from friends and family. Frothy is good for entrepreneurs. Seed-round investment. Sweat equity.

Software Review 120

Software Review Sweat Equity Accredited Investor Angel Investor 120

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Hire a professional marketing and public relations agency once you have a good revenue stream but you don’t need them to start a free blog, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts with initial content and complete the basics of search engine optimization. Cash flow can be drastically reduced by working out of your garage.

Burn Rate 120

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 120

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder September 7, 2010 | View Comments Steve Job's Technical Co-Founder “I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.&# I was in this situation and we barely escaped.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Blame it On Marketing In the next 3-6 months, a new VP of Sales is hired. innovation.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

The Next Web

MARCH 6, 2014

Here’s a problem I bet every non-technical founder has experienced: the communication gap between what the biz dev team wants and what the tech team thinks they want, and vice versa. It’s disruptive, and for founders, very frustrating to watch. Hire T-Shaped People. Make sure to hire T-shaped individuals.

Technical Review 129

Technical Review Development Team Review Developer Agile 129

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Exactly three months after its $48 Million funding announcement, Smooth-Stone today detailed its company momentum, including significant new executive hires, new office space and renaming the company. The new name, Calxeda , pronounced “Cal-zeh-dah,” is a derivative of the Latin for “Smooth-Stone.”

Naming 59

Naming Hiring Technical Review Virginia 59

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

The investors, founders, and “community” are all super excited about ASC. They close on the $750k, hire a buddy or two, buy some Macs, and get to work. ASC starts building product, but as they get into the thick of it, the team realizes executing on their vision is going to be extremely hard. Sound familiar?

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Jeff Hilimire

OCTOBER 8, 2014

We actually met taking some web development classes in Chicago. I was doing an early-stage startup in Chicago and Betsy was running a physical product development company in Charlotte that she’d recently sold. Both Betsy and I come from entrepreneurial backgrounds before starting TTS. Nice growth!

Cofounder 68

Cofounder Charlotte Raleigh Atlanta 68

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

In a seed or friends and family round, tough questions, in the eyes of many founders, signal an investor that will either a) never get to the writing a check part or b) be such a pain in the ass afterwards that it might not be worth taking their money. Something isn''t going to go your way--product development, hiring, revenues.

Technical Review 118

Technical Review Due Diligence Angel Investor Venture Capital 118

Business Plan Blog

AUGUST 20, 2013

However, the biggest mistake that a non-tech entrepreneur launching a tech business is to neglect bringing on a tech savvy co-founder on the management team. This is generally achieved in one of the following ways: CTO Level Co-Founder (Equity). Your web/mobile idea needs to be transformed into a working product/service.

CTO Hire 55

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Architecture Cofounder 55

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Spencer Fry

DECEMBER 16, 2019

I've chosen to continue to lead product, but I've given up almost all of my responsibilities in regard to marketing and support. New hiring responsibilities. We now have 6 product developers — if you include our CTO — and they're often working on different projects. Our individual departments got bigger.

CTO Hire 44

CTO Hire Wiki Product Development Matching 44

www.informationarbitrage.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing. Too often, however, I have found CTO / Founders paired with business people who not only don't add value, but frequently detract from the value of the business. So my advice to CTO / Founders?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Founder Cap Table Vesting 40

The Next Web

DECEMBER 2, 2013

Therefore, if you want to bring an MVP ( Minimum Viable Product ) to market, Werdelin approximates that you’ll need $50,000 to $250,000 , depending on the skill sets of the developers and designers you hire. Werdelin equates building a successful product to building a nightclub. 3) Facebook. 6) Pinterest.

Cost 168

Cost San Francisco New York City Ruby 168

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 31, 2016

More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended the event – coming from as far as South Africa and Nova Scotia. As an investor and former founder, I know that scalable growth (and the pretty hockey stick graph) is the holy grail for every startup. When is the right time to hire a growth person?

Software Review 60

Software Review South Africa Hockey Stick Viral 60