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How Do You Plan Your Startup’s Scaling Into Multiple Markets?
“Do you have a VP Sales lined up?” The investor asked me during a diligence meeting. “I do,” I answered (I’ll get back to this later). Not only should you start planning your go to market strategies for the various countries you are going to enter, you should start planning BEFORE you start your company.…
Read MoreHow Can You Use Being First To Market A True Advantage?
I’ve been fortunate enough during my career to be involved with hundreds of product launches during my career. I’ve been first to market, second to market, and very late to a market, so I’ve seen the power of being first to market. If you handle being first to market right, you are unstoppable. Years ago,…
Read MoreHow Do You Know When To Release Your Killer Product?
I was walking out of the Decathlon Club one Saturday morning. I had just finished my workout. A beautiful woman drove into the Decathlon Club parking lot, and I thought to myself, “Park your car next to mine.” And she did. Just as I walking to my car. And that’s how I met my wife.…
Read MoreCan You Start A Company With Someone You Barely Know?
I am a firm believer in the nine-month rule when it comes to startups. What’s the nine-month rule you ask? The nine-month rule is you need to work together for at least nine-months before you know whether your co-founder relationship has a chance of success. The first three months are the honeymoon phase. Everything is…
Read MoreWhy Is It So Important For You To Be Number One In A Market Segment?
General Electric in the 1980’s, under the leadership of Jack Welch, had a very simple goal for all of its businesses: Become number one or number two in market share or we (General Electric) will exit the business. The theory was that you just weren’t relevant unless you got to number one or number two…
Read MoreHow Should You Manage Employees In Your Startup?
There are two extremes when it comes managing people. There’s the old-school command and control model where you don’t give your employees any flexibility. On the other side there’s the Zappos style of management (or even coaching) where you push the decision making down in the organization. What I’ve seen work best is pushing the…
Read MoreWhat Should I Do When An Employee Challenges My Strategy?
One of the best people I ever worked with was Greg. Greg is a brilliant engineer, and Greg is probably one of the five best analog IC design engineers on the planet. Greg, like many brilliant engineers, isn’t shy about sharing his opinions. And Greg certainly wasn’t shy about telling me when he disagreed with…
Read MoreWhat Should You Do If Your Competitor Gets To Market Ahead Of You?
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 year when I ran my own company. Sometimes we got to market ahead of our…
Read MoreShould You Build Your Core Team Or Your MVP First?
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 saying build a team of 50 people. I am saying that you are…
Read MoreWhat Are The Three Reasons Your Startup Will Succeed?
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 he calls “Rachleff’s law” named after venture capitalist Andy Rachleff. Rachleff’s law…
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