“It is sacrosanct,” one of our investors said to me. I told him that we would perform a layoff in preparation for the next round of funding. If you are not sure what to do next and feel like you have no one to talk to, click here to apply for 1:1 coaching. There really…
“I think we’re getting really close to getting funding,” I said to myself. We had just had another VC pass, but THE WAY VCs were passing seemed different to me. Maybe we were getting close to getting funded. More likely we weren’t. Is something wrong with your pitch and you don’t know how to fix…
“That is sacrosanct,” one of our investors, “Raul”, said to me. I had just told Raul that we were going to perform a layoff as part of our next funding round. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Raul was pleased to hear me state the obvious. We needed…
“They own the fundamental patents on how to make an integrated circuit. We’re not going to sue them,” Dave Fullagar, Maxim Integrated Products co-founder and VP Engineering, said to me. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Dave was explaining to me the facts of life. I was a running…
“We are going to grow our earnings by one penny per share per quarter,” Jack Gifford, Maxim Integrated Products founding CEO, regularly said to public market sell side analysts. And every quarter, like a clock, the company grew earnings at one penny per quarter or better. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I…
When I was fighting for my company’s life, battling with, one of our investors, the notorious “Donald Ventures”, to keep our company alive, I thought about my wife and daughter a lot. They had supported me emotionally, and I didn’t want to let them down. The stress I was under, during that one year time…
“Where did they find these people?” I asked my friend and employee, Steve. “We would have never hired them at Maxim (Integrated Products).” [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] I was talking to Steve after I’d been at Micrel for a month as General Manager of one of…
“You’ve figured it out,” I said smiling to “Vern”, an engineer turned CEO that I’ve been working with. Since we started working together, I’ve been urging Vern to drive sales himself. Yet, until this conversation, he resisted my suggestion. Vern sells enterprise software. Each deal Vern’s company inks is worth well into six or seven…
I was talking with an entrepreneur the other day about his company. He said to me, “I’ve asked customers if the would buy my product and they said they would. That counts as validation, doesn’t it?” I was talking with an entrepreneur the other day about his company. Ezra said to me, “I’ve asked customers…
Back in the day, long before the internet and ChatGPT, I would drive over to Stanford University to do my market research. The business school had a really nice library where I could find just about everything I wanted. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. This would be…