It’s surprisingly uncommon for your co-founder to want to be co-CEO with you. I had it happen to me, and I’ve had more than one CEO that I’ve worked with have a founder ask to be co-CEO. In this video, I’ll share my story and the story of “Bob”, a CEO I’m working with, of…
“Are you having fun?” Bob Dobkin, our only angel investor, asked me when I was giving him an update on our progress about two months after we closed our Series A funding. Bob was the co-founder and CTO/VP Engineering of Linear Technology. Linear was arguably the most successful analog semiconductor company of the last 30…
“I’m really impressed with your new CFO,” I said to “Kevin”, the CEO of a startup I’m working with. “I love his attitude, and I love what he had to say about joining your company.” “You don’t know the half of it,” Kevin said to me. “He’s (the new CFO) hit the ground running, and…
You just hired your new VP Sales six months ago, and now you’re beginning to wonder if you made a mistake. Your previous VP Sales only lasted three months, and now you’re worried that your board is going to lose confidence in you too. What should you do? In today’s video, we go through this…
Have you ever heard the story of Toughskins Jeans, made by Sears? If you go back in time to the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the jeans market was dominated by Levi’s 501 jeans. Sears wasn’t doing too well in the jeans market competing against Levi’s, so they talked to its customers and discovered that…
There’s a great story about how Earl Woods, Tiger Woods father, taught him about how to be cool under pressure. In golf, the audience is supposed to be quiet while a player prepares to hit the golf ball. Earl turned everything upside to teach his young son. Earl would throw golf clubs, jingle his car…
Imagine this scenario. Your co-founder of five years, who owns the same 40% of the company you do, decides he is unhappy with his role, and he stops working, daring you to fire him. Firing him is the easy decision. The tougher decisions are should you buy him out and what should you do with…
I wake up, and I look at the clock. It’s 2:14 AM. I had gone to sleep at midnight, and here I was, awake two hours later. “Maybe this time, I’ll be able to break the pattern and go back to sleep,” I say to myself. For the next hour, my mind was racing, as…
When you think about the qualities that every successful startup must have, you’re likely to think about having a great team, a great CEO, grit, an exploding market, a great culture, and a friendly competitor. There’s a lot to choose from. But there’s one quality that you absolutely, positively have to have. Can you guess…
Your largest customer, representing over 80 percent of your revenue, threatens they are not going to work with you anymore. Making matters worse, your startup is in the middle of fundraising. What should you do? In today’s video, I’m going to go over this real life problem that a startup CEO I’m advising, “Gary”, is…