Why Your Non Technical CEO Should Be Involved In Engineering By Brett Fox I’m sorry, but I think you’re making a horrible mistake. Your CEO not only is justified in getting involved in the technical matters, your CEO, regardless of his technical background, should be getting involved in technical matters. More importantly, you should be…
How Do You Reach Customers Without Cold Calling? By Brett Fox There are so many different ways to reach customers that you don’t have to cold call. Yes, there are the obvious ones like advertising on Google, Facebook or even here on Quora. Here are some non-obvious marketing channels I’ve seen work to gain traction:…
What Is The One Book Everyone In Your Company Should Read? By Brett Fox I currently have ten books on my list for CEOs to read. They include the books you would expect including Clayton Christensen’s masterpiece, The Innovator’s Dilemma. The Innovator’s Dilemma is a great book. It’s like the bible for startups. However, if…
How Do You Negotiate With Potential Investors? By Brett Fox I was so excited when we got the term sheet from the investor. Then I looked at the numbers. The deal sucked. The investor was taking more than the normal percentage at this stage. But I was confident I could negotiate a better deal. The…
Should You Ask For Backpay When You Close Your Funding? By Brett Fox Welcome to the world of sweat equity. I’ve been in your shoes. I went over two years without collecting a salary while we started the company and raised our initial funding. I didn’t ask for backpay, nor do I think our investors…
How Do You Handle Big Differences Between You And Your Cofounder? By Brett Fox “I know more about building a company than you do,” one my co-founders said to me over the phone. Those were the last words “John” ever said to me as he quit the company. John was a brilliant technologist. His fellow…
We got most of our top talent from two companies (Maxim and Linear Technology) in our industry that were the equivalent of Apple, Google, and Facebook. We knew we weren’t going to pay higher salaries than Maxim and Linear. Indeed, most of the people that joined us from Maxim and Linear took pay cuts. We…
How Do You Deal With Employee Burnout? By Brett Fox I love running. Specifically, I love distance running. It’s so peaceful when you go on a long run in the early morning. And that’s really true now that the weather’s gotten colder. It’s just you and your thoughts. Or maybe it’s just you, your thoughts,…
“We used to be even better than this,” the Vice President of one of the world’s largest distributors said to me as we were taking a tour of the distributor’s facility. The Vice President was responding to how impressed I was with the consistency of the answers and actions I was hearing and seeing from…
How Do You Raise Funding After Creating Your MVP? By Brett Fox Great. You’ve developed a kick-ass MVP that your customers are buying. So what. That’s the question (or questions) you’re going to need to answer in order to raise money. Just because customers are buying your product doesn’t mean you are going to get…