“I run out of money in April,” “Steve” said to me. “I think we’re going to add three new customers this month and I can get to ten new customers with my contacts…” “So you’ve got four months of runway left,” I interjected. “Yes, but look at my plan,” Steve said, excitedly. “I’m going to…
“We have to ask ourselves the question, Are we going to be a company that spends freely, or are we going to be a company that manages its money well?” I said to the executive staff in our weekly staff meeting. We had just received our initial funding a few months earlier, but I wasn’t…
“Hey Brett, I’m going to be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. I’ll pick up the diligence when I get back,” Tucker said to me. Tucker was a potential new investor in our company. I could tell he was serious about investing in our company based on the work he was doing. Download…
I started my company with two co-founders: “Jim” and “John”. I was the CEO, Jim was the marketing guy, and John was the engineering guy. My two co-founders and I had worked together previously. We understood the plan and direction we were going in. We started pitching VCs after working on the plan for about…
One of the smartest things I ever did as CEO was practice, “Management by walking around.” The idea is really simple. You, the CEO, walk around your office, facility, or manufacturing site and talk to anyone you come in contact with. I didn’t invent Management by walking around. Far from it. The technique was popularized…
“You need to sign an NDA,” my co-founder “John”, said to David, the investor we were presenting to. It was our second meeting with David, and John’s comment took me totally by surprise, but David’s response didn’t take me by surprise. David looked at our VP Engineering and said, “We can stop right there. I’m…
I remember talking with Jeroen, my fellow co-founder and VP of Engineering. Jeroen smiled at me and said, “I’m in line at the market and I just want everyone to start moving faster! “That used to never happen to me.” Then we both laughed. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can…
“It’s the suckiest thing about being a startup CEO,” I said to “Bill”. I could see the sadness written all over his face. “I can totally relate because I went through the same thing,” I said. “The people you start (your company) with are not necessarily the people you finish with. “I know,” I said.…
“You screwed up,” “Bob”, the CEO, said to his executive team during our weekly operations meeting. “How am I going to explain this to ‘the street’?” Bob was upset because the company had missed its promised numbers to Wall Street, again. And now Bob would have to explain the miss to market analysts. Or would…
“You can’t tell the new investors that ‘Tommy’ quit!” “Raul”, one of my investors, said to me when I told him our new VP Sales, had resigned that morning. “Your job now is to get him (Tommy) to change his mind,” Raul said. I called Gill, our other investor, to let him know about Tommy.…