How Do You Determine Your Total Available Market?

Understanding how big your total available market is a critical step in building your startup, and understanding your TAM is a critical slide when you’re fundraising.  Yet most entrepreneurs get their total available market slide wrong. Part of the problem is should you present your TAM or your SAM? Or, maybe you should you present…

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How Do You Buy Out Your Co-Founder?

I had four co-founders. I had to fire one of my co-founders within six months of us being operational. This was six months before we had any revenue. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. The negotiation of “Randy’s” exit was simple. It took less than one hour to complete.…

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How Often Should You Call A Big Potential Customer?

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was from a mentor I had named Lew. Lew was an old school sales guy, trained by the legendary Don Valentine at Fairchild Semiconductor back in the day. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here. After working at Fairchild,…

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How Do You Value Your Startup?

There’s a lot of advice for entrepreneurs on how do you value your startup. Unfortunately, most of the startup advice is wrong. The goal of today’s video is to give you a simple methodology for valuing your startup; especially if your company is an early stage startup. We’ll look at how you answer investors questions…

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What Should You Do When You’re Burned Out?

I remember the moment clearly. We had finally gotten to $100K per month in revenue. This should have been a moment of celebration because $100K per month is when you’ve hit escape velocity. If you just keep at it, you’ll be at $1 million per month in no time flat. [Do you want to grow…

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How Do You Recruit Your Startup Team?

Years ago, I was in a meeting with Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim Integrated Products. Maxim’s revenue was around $1 billion per year at the time. Also in the meeting was “Peter”, one of the best engineering managers in the company. Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click…

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How Square’s Pitch Deck Can Help You Raise Money

Square’s pitch deck is one of the more interesting investor pitch decks available online.  So, the question is what lessons can you apply to your pitch deck based on the Square’s pitch deck? In today’s video, I’ll break down Square’s pitch deck presentation, slide by slide, so you can improve your investment pitch deck structure. …

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The Secret To Presenting Your Pitch Deck Financials

There’s a right way and a wrong way to show your pitch deck financials when you pitch investors. The problem is that just about every entrepreneur presents their financial slide incorrectly. If you present your pitch deck financial slide incorrectly, the result is a lost opportunity for you, the CEO, to improve your chances of…

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The Slide To Add To Your Pitch…

No One Tells You About There’s one slide that you should add to your pitch deck that no one tells you about. But, when you add it to your deck, it shows potential investors that you:  Are Transparent Know the market and the competition Know your strengths and weaknesses You’ll be a great CEO to…

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How Do You Prepare A Cash Flow Forecast?

Before I launched my startup, I built an elaborate Excel spreadsheet to forecast how our company would grow. The spreadsheet had tabs for headcount, revenue by product, gross margin, rent, and cashflow. [Do you want to grow your business? Maybe I can help. Click here.] At the heart of the model, was the product revenue…

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