I remember when I started my company I thought I needed a board of advisors. After all, every other startup company that I looked at had an impressive list of advisors on their website. I thought, “this must be one of the keys to raising money. I’d better find my group of advisors.” So, I…
When you’re an entrepreneur raising money for your startup from angel investors or venture capitalists, the question that’s on your mind is, “How much equity should you give your investors?” It’s a tough question to answer because angel investors and venture capitalists negotiate term sheets every day and you don’t. I’ve raised over $100 million…
I’ll never forget one of my investors, “Raul”, asking me how much I was going to pay myself after we closed our $12 million round of funding. I told Raul I was going to pay myself $200,000, well below the market rate of $250,000 at the time. This was significantly more than the zero salary…
“Where did they find these people?” I asked my friend and employee, Steve. “We would have never hired them at Maxim (Integrated Products).” I was talking to Steve after I’d been at Micrel for a month as General Manager of one of the company’s three divisions. Steve had been at Micrel for two years,…
Malcolm Gladwell, in his landmark book, “Blink”, explained how you only have 7 seven short seconds to make a connection with your audience or you lose their attention. Microsoft did a study showing attention spans are only 8 seconds. That’s it. That’s all the time you get.
There’s a great story in Ben Horowitz’s book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, that I can really relate to. In the book, Horowitz’s company, Opsware, was going to IPO. At the same time, they were going to perform a layoff. Horowitz was planning on being in New York for the IPO until one of…
You launched your startup’s first product, and, now that it’s been in the market for a while, you can see it’s not scaling and you just don’t know why? In today’s video, I’m going to explain the likely reasons why your having trouble scaling and what you can do to fix it. I’ve launched hundreds…
A few years ago, I was in the first board meeting for a startup that just closed its initial venture funding. The company’s founder, “Ray”, had been working with me since the company’s inception, and he asked me to be on the board. At the end of the board meeting, there was a discussion about…
“Brett, we’re going to need to shutdown our advertising,” Tina, our controller, said to me. “We need to preserve our cash until we get more funding. Look at the cash flow (statement).” Tina and I were reviewing what we needed to do after one of our investors, the notorious “Donald Ventures”, pulled their support for…
Venture Capitalist John Doerr famously said that the key to success is setting the right goals. And, of course, Doerr’s right. You do need to set the right goals to succeed. However, there are other things you need to do, in addition to setting the right goals, to succeed. That’s what today’s video is all…