What Should You Do If Your Competitor Gets To Market Ahead Of You? By Brett Fox One of the great things about spending the bulk of my career in the analog IC business is you are always introducing products. I’ve launched hundreds of products over the years, and we were introducing over 30 new products…
A couple lifetimes ago, I was working for a company where the CEO liked to have a weekly operations meeting. A weekly operations meeting with the CEO and operations leader is pretty normal in a technology company. This CEO’s operations meeting were a little different than most. Rather than taking a detailed, hard-nosed, look into…
Should Your Build Your Core Team Or Your MVP First? By Brett Fox Why do you have to choose between building your core team first or building your first product? You’re likely going to need a team of some sort to build your first product, or where is the barrier to entry? Now, I’m not…
What Are The Three Reasons Your Startup Will Succeed? By Brett Fox Marc Andreessen wrote an excellent blog post about why startups succeed. His view is, when you look at the three key components to success (team, product, and market), that the market is the most important reason that a startup succeed. Andreessen quotes what…
What Are Some Signs You Should Give Up On Your Startup? By Brett Fox I drove home from Sand Hill Road. We had just been turned down. Again. This was the 63rd VC that decided not to invest in our company. And this rejection was particularly vicious. We had gone through weeks of diligence, and…
What’s The Hardest Thing About Starting A Business After You’re 40? By Brett Fox I was in my 40’s when I started my company, so I am somewhat of an expert on this topic. I can tell you what weren’t the hardest things for me: A. It wasn’t experience. When you’re in your 40’s you…
You’ve worked really hard creating a really solid investor pitch about your company. You’ve rehearsed your investor pitch, and you feel ready to go. Then you start pitching investors, but something isn’t right. The investor pitch is still not working. Investors are not biting. And the problem is you don’t get a second chance when…
I considered a lot VP Engineering/CTO candidates before Jeroen agreed to join me as cofounder. It was the good, the bad, and the ugly. There were a lot of near misses where the fit just wasn’t there or something wasn’t quite right. If there’s one thing I learned in the process, is you can’t just…
How Long Should Your Startup Pitch Take? By Brett Fox Imagine you’ve been invited to present your company to the full partnership of a VC firm. You bring the executive team with you because you felt it was the right thing to do. You start out your pitch to the partnership. You barely get going…
One of the biggest debates we had early on was whether to buy an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to scale our manufacturing. I’ll never forget it because it set off a chain of events that changed our company forever. Here’s the story… Two of my cofounders, “Ken” and “Randy”, came into my office about…