“I would like you to invest $50,000 in my startup,” “Peter” said to me. Peter and I had been introduced a few weeks earlier, and I’d met with him a couple of times. I really liked what Peter was doing, and I was happy to advise him. However, investing in Peter’s company was another matter.…
“I like you, Brett. And I really like what you’re (company is) doing,” Jack, the Venture Capitalist, said to me. “However, I think I’ll wait until you have a VP Engineering before I invest.” In my pitch I had been upfront with Jack that we were looking for a VP Engineering, and, in the interim,…
If there’s one thing I am an expert in, it’s bad co-founders. After all, the first two teams of co-founders I tried to start my company with didn’t work out. There were “Jim” and “John”, my first two co-founders. We worked together for about five months before they quit, stole the company’s IP, and then…
“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…
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…
“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.…