“You want to do what?” The investor said to me. “It seems like financial engineering. Why don’t you just skip that phase and get right to the unique products?” The investor didn’t get it. We had a two part strategy that had proven to be successful previously. I didn’t need to wait for the rejection…
“Why did you connect to Franz on LinkedIn?” I emailed my cofounder, “Ken”. Franz was a Senior VP at one of the largest distributors in North America for Semiconductors. We had just signed an agreement with Franz’s company, and I didn’t want it to leak to our largest competitor, Maxim. Ken and I had tons…
Getting your sales organization motivated to sell can be one of the most challenging problems you will face building your company. It’s a true chicken and egg problem. To scale your company’s sales, you need a great sales organization. However, to build a great sales organization, you need to show you have a product or…
Imagine this scene. It’s your first board meeting after closing your $10M Series A round. You update the board comprised of you, your cofounder, your attorney, and your two investors on your progress. Then you excuse your cofounder for the closed session of the board meeting where you review your financials. You go through your…
“The hardest part of building our company will be raising the initial funding,” I naively said to my fellow cofounders. Every one of them nodded their heads in agreement. I continued on with my pep talk. “We’ll be home free once the funding closes. We’ve built businesses like this before. We know what we’re doing,…
You’re about to start raising money for the first time, but you’re unsure about exactly what you need to do in advance. And with the odds being about 300:1 against you receiving money from any given investor, you need to get it right the first time. I’ll clear up the confusion for you, and I’ll…
Years ago, I ran a business where we had developed a groundbreaking product called the MAX232. The product was so successful that fourteen competitors eventually built what they believed were exact replicas of our MAX232. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Many of our competitors, including Texas Instruments…
“Bring us up to your level,” “Bob” the CEO said to me in his office. Bob was pitching me on becoming general manager of one of the company’s three business units. I smiled, we shook hands, and I left his office. The truth was that I wasn’t sold on whether I wanted to work with…
Do you really have to be a super genius to be a successful startup CEO? The answer is obviously no. Not only can being a genius work against you as a startup CEO, but most of the qualities required to be a successful startup CEO have nothing to do with being a genius. I’ll give…
There’s a great quote that US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity. He said, “I know it when I see it.” The same can said about Product Market Fit from my experience. You know it when you see it. When we started selling, I had visions of our products instantly flying off the…