Remove Coach Remove CTO Coach Remove Customer Remove Sales
article thumbnail

People Management: Startup Teams Should Dip but not Skip

Both Sides of the Table

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. You’re also learning directly about the skills of your sales staff by observing them in action.

Startup 308
article thumbnail

Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO

Both Sides of the Table

In practice it can be a fine line between sparring partner / coach and stepping over the line to brute-force persuasion. At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. Another area we CEOs often meddle is in sales. I did this.

Startup 150
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Venture Capital is About Human Capital

Both Sides of the Table

We help founders through difficult moments, we help coach, we act as sparring partners, we help them resolve conflicts when they’re fighting with co-founders and we help them deal with adversity as well as successes. We then help surround founders with other talent who want to join important causes but don’t have the startup idea themselves.

article thumbnail

What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Both Sides of the Table

Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. What lovely charts!

article thumbnail

8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. So if all I need to do is make some customer calls, interview potential employees or help with his fund-raising decks – hallelujah. And improve.

Tips 365
article thumbnail

Technology Roles in Startups

SoCal CTO

Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. I am looking for one or two startups that I can work with on their road to success as a virtual C-level officer, board member, advisor or other relationship.