There’s only one thing you have complete control over when you start a company. Only one. Everything else, to some degree or other, is out of your control. What is this one thing that’s in your control? It’s your cash. As I said at the beginning, everything else isn’t completely in your control. Let…
The concept of the lean startup has really always been part of the startup vocabulary. Long before it was made popular and the book was written, many entrepreneurs were following the basic concepts of the lean startup. The concept is simple and logical to follow: Essentially, you just: Develop the simplest version of your product…
I don’t why, but years ago, when I was in high school, my Dad got involved in a business building replicas of old classic cars. As I remember it, the company bought old VW? engines, put a classic car chassis around them and sold the cars at a profit. The idea wasn’t my Dad’s. It…
“You’re not going to hit your numbers,” I said to “Josh”. “You’re way too optimistic. I’d much rather you underpromise and overdeliver, especially right now. Josh is in the middle of a sale process for his company. He’s working with an investment banker to manage the sale process. The sale process is going really well.…
There are some things you never forget, no matter how long you live. And the meeting “Peter” and I had years ago with Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim Integrated Products, was one of them. Peter had just been named Managing Director of the Engineering organization for a business unit that built amplifiers. It…
“Give us $11 million, and we’ll build you a billion dollar company,” I said to every investor we met when I was raising our initial funding. At the time we were raising our initial funding, the Venture Capital community in the Silicon Valley had been burned over and over again by semiconductor companies where they…
There are some things that you just shouldn’t do when you’re developing a pitch deck for investors. And, there’s one thing in particular that you shouldn’t do that can kill your chances of raising money. Making matters worse, this one thing sounds like a great idea. In fact, you’ll be tempted to pay a…
“That sounds like death by one thousand cuts,” Rob, the VC I was pitching to said to me. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. I had just told Rob that the average customer would buy $10,000 per year of our products and that the average product would sell…
There are some things you never forget, no matter how long you live. And the meeting “Peter” and I had years ago with Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim Integrated Products, was one of them. Peter had just been named Managing Director of the Engineering organization for a business unit that built amplifiers. It…
There was a fellow that I worked with years ago and his name is Harry, or at least we’re going to call him Harry for the sake of the story. Harry was a genius. No question about it. He had a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MBA. Harry had over twenty patents and counting.…