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Advice for CTO Founders: Don't Let Business Kill the Business

SoCal Delicious

Home About Press IA Capital Partners Archives After 17 years in M&A, Derivatives and Trading, Im spending my time with young entrepreneurs in and around financial technology and digital media. Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing.

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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. So he would allocate say – 20% to sales, 15% to marketing, 20% to eng priorities, 10% to customer support, 10% to ops, 20% to ‘platinum customers’ and maybe 5% directly to me as the CEO.

Startup 150
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8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

But the thing I am most proud of about Rob is that he has taken a company with a uniquely talented founder & CTO – Nick Halstead – and managed to build a very tight working relationship with Nick where we drive world-class product development without having the usual founder / CEO conflicts. Ask for short conference calls.

Tips 365
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Interview with Alex Benzer, SocialEngine

socalTECH

We have about 8500 customers there, but only a small percentage have built great communities that took off, and the rest floundered. That's why we built FanMix, to solve our own problem, and help our SocialEngine customers to promote their own sites. We have some great mentors now. It's actually uncommon to have a female CTO.

Startup 242
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Interview with Justin and Dawn Newton, Netki

socalTECH

In my case, I had a mentor at the time who helped me understand how there was a parallel between the printing press and the Renaissance, and the Internet as the next step in information and communications. After that, I was CTO of Blackline Systems, and was responsible for behind-the-firewall.

Startup 100