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…
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…
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…
Do you want goals that are easy to hit? Or do you want goals that you and your team are going to have to really stretch to hit? The reality is you need both types of goals for you company to succeed. I’l explain how you can, not only make these different types of goals…
I’ve worked with a lot of startup CEO’s, and I see the same two killer fundraising mistakes made over and over again. One of them will kill you before you get started, and the mistake will kill you when you’re raising money. What are these killer mistakes, and, more importantly, how can you avoid them?…
“Tell me about the whole market first,” Jack Gifford, Maxim’s CEO, said to me. We were meeting at the Peppermill in Cupertino like we always did for our Tuesday morning breakfast meetings. For this meeting it was me, Ziya who was my boss, Dave Fullagar who was the VP Engineering, and I believe Len Sherman…
I used to meet with my cofounders a few times a week. We were each working on parts of our business plan. “John” was working on the engineering model, “Jim” was working on the marketing model, and I was working on the overall financial plan. After about two months of staring at each other across…
It’s inevitable. You’re going to have an employee that did a great job for you early on in your company, but now that same employee is having trouble as the company grows bigger. What you do when you face this inevitable challenge will determine more about the fate of your company than you might realize.…
“Don’t try and be something that you’re not,” that was the advice I gave to myself when I started my company. Even though I have a BSEE and a few patents, I’d been on the “dark side”, as my wife calls the business side of a technology company, for years. I wasn’t going to be…