I was having lunch with my friend Matt. Matt was, at the time, a Senior VP at Maxim Integrated Products and Maxim was our largest competitor. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. I had sold my company about four months earlier, and we were just catching up. He…
I’ve been doing a lot of research on Steve Jobs lately. Did you know that he used to practice his Macworld and product launch presentations around 200 times before the big event? [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Watch any Jobs presentation and you’ll notice how smooth and effortless…
“How long is the new funding going to last you?” I asked “Sam.” Sam said, “About one year.” [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] “That’s not long enough,” I replied. You really want your funding to last eighteen months. Ideally, you’d like your funding to last two years. “Why…
“The minute you tell your employees they’re going to minimum wage, they’re going to start looking,” my friend and mentor, Dave, said to me. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Earlier that day in our board meeting, one of our investors suggested that we shut the company down…
There are some things you never forget when you’re a startup CEO, and watching my co-founder and VP Sales, “Ken,” run around the office yelling, “Hey, Hey!” after we got our first order is one of them. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. We had just soft launched…
“Brett, Tony Hsieh died,” Blossom said to me. “What?” I was just waking up, and this news wasn’t registering with me. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. “Tony Hsieh died. I know you really liked him,” my wife said to me. “How?” “The house he was staying at…
You know the saying, “It starts at the top.” Well, guess who’s at the top? You, the CEO, are at the top when it comes to your organization and its culture. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. Yes, you certainly have hired some people that are gossiping. And,…
I considered a lot VP Engineering/CTO candidates before Jeroen agreed to join me as co-founder. The candidates were the good, the bad, and the ugly. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] There were a lot of near misses where the fit just wasn’t there or something wasn’t quite…
A couple lifetimes ago, I was working for a company where the CEO, “Bob”, liked to have a weekly operations meeting. A weekly operations meeting with the CEO and operations leader is pretty normal in a technology company. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. This CEO’s operations meeting…
“Tell me about your background,” I said to “Jim.” “John,” my co-founder who recommended Jim to me as our VP Engineering, and I were having lunch with Jim at Bucks. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] Bucks, for those of you not living in the Silicon Valley, is…